Alternatively
by Kathryn Shadow
Summary: She can't live a fantastic life without him; maybe she doesn't have to. Reunion!fic, modelled after a true series as much as possible, narrated by our favourite luminous being, and stealing a chapter from TCASM's "What If". 10/Rose, alt!Ten/Rose
1. Alternatively, part I

Yes, I succumbed to The Demand... erm... -cough- Challenge.

I stole a chapter from TCASM's _What If _series. It's chapter... erm... I want to say 120-something? Oh, I dunno. I've underlined her bits. The italicised-ness is just our favourite superintelligent pan-dimensional luminous being talking.

**Disclaimer: **I don't even own the first chunk of this chapter! -pause- Rassilon, that's sad.

**SIAPNIAN: **By the way, this is a reunion!fic. -smirks at your rolling eyes- I'm also trying to emulate the series itself as fully as possible (i.e. thirteen "episodes"), but only have the idea for the first "episode" and little bits of the finale. In other words, the updates will be even slower than they usually are, as A. I'm working on a science-fiction story over on Fictionpress (Yes, I DO write non-fanfiction), B. School has begun with a vengeance, now that I've finished the finals and midterm (B in Physics, which really isn't bad considering I didn't study for it until about 11.30 the night before the test, A in Algebra and A in English), and C. I need to poke my family members for more episode ideas.

**Dedication: **My father. He requested I do a pseudo-episode with this plot-line. He just didn't know that he was fuelling my addiction to writing reunion!fics...

-BAD WOLF-

_He stopped looking._

_I wonder why, even though he has yet to discover half of my messages. Did he think I was simply a fluke? A quirk in the otherwise 'normal' life of one Rose Tyler? Did he think if he put me out of his mind I would never be needed or seen again?_

_I am always there for him, for my friends and family. I show myself to Jack sometimes, but even though the little voice in his head always says that something is going on, he doesn't listen. How very human, poor Jack. The Doctor passed my signature by without a second glace, and how did he not notice where his and her 'last' meeting was?_

_Everything ends, everything has its time._

_But mine and ours is nowhere near._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose slung her ever-present satchel over her shoulder— you couldn't work with Torchwood as long as she had and _not _get into the habit of carrying some things with you wherever you went— and started to walk out of the building.

She spun around to the sound of Mickey calling her name.

"D'you want a lift back home?" he asked of her.

_More than anything, but you can't give it to me, _came the bitter thought.

"Nah, I was just gonna walk," she replied, biting back her original answer.

"You run for your life every few days, though," commented Mickey. "Thought you wouldn't want to stand any more."

She used to run for her life every day, until her legs wouldn't have held her if not for the fear— no, not fear, she corrected herself; she was hardly ever afraid. It was the _thrill _of being chased that kept her running. And then, sometimes, the Doctor would have to carry her back to the TARDIS when that wore off... He could be so sweet, when he wasn't being a complete git...

She swallowed, forcing the pain which tried to emerge into a small, cold knot buried in the centre of her fractured soul, shoving the Mickey-directed anger away along with it. He couldn't know, she reminded herself; the Doctor hadn't exactly been truthful about most of their escapades so that he could avoid Jackie's slaps and Mickey's protests that he wasn't keeping her safe enough...

She shook herself sharply, shoving that in the darkest corner of her mind, closing and locking the door.

"You'd be surprised," was all she said.

And she started to walk.

A month, it had been. A month since Bad Wolf Bay, since the Doctor left his last words to her unsaid.

Had it only been a month? said one thought.

Had it really been that long? came another.

She had pretended to get over it, crying for most of the way to Pete's mansion but then just... not. The Doctor wouldn't have wanted her to be upset. He had said before that he wanted her to have a fantastic life.

Her life couldn't be truly fantastic without him, but she could pretend. And maybe if she pretended enough and her facade became good enough, she could convince herself.

But there were times when someone said something apparently harmless, and her pretence cracked enough for her to see how truly false it was.

This wasn't helping, she snapped at herself, and shook her head sharply to clear it of the sound of the TARDIS, but, being a very persistent illusion, it remained.

She had heard the TARDIS several times in this world, but knew it was just her imagination; what else could it be? He had said it was impossible, in the sort of tone which meant it was impossible even for him, and unthinkable to anyone else in that or any universe.

This time, though, it was different.

This time, the TARDIS was materialising, not dematerialising.

And this time, the battered blue box appeared on the street corner.

She stopped dead, staring, part of her irked that she was hallucinating as well, the other part glowing with hopeless hope that she wasn't...

Without warning and without her command, her legs sent her running to the box and the pinstripe-clad man who was stepping out of it, a cry of "Doctor" tearing itself unbidden from her lips.

She skidded to a halt just before him. "You... you did it? Did you do it?"

He blinked. "What do you mean? Do what?"

She glared at him.

"Oh. Ah!" He paused. "Ahm, you see," he began, rubbing the back of his neck absently, "time travel's a bit weird, things don't always happen to me in the right order, and even when they do I have a horrible memory— you know how it is... Then again, maybe you don't..."

She rolled her eyes, unable to keep a smile from creeping across her face at his incessant babbling.

"But the _point _is... what was the point?" He paused, frowning at the sidewalk. "Ah! Yes! Um... Do I... know you?"

-BAD WOLF-

-evil giggle-

If this chapter was crap, it's because it is currently 0006 (12.06 AM for those of you who don't understand) and I just skated around a very, very crowded rink while trying to maintain a conversation. Which is harder than it sounds. So I am very, very tired.

Review or the pirate-who-is-somewhat-cute-but-is-most-definitely-not-as-cute-as-Ten gets it! -holds up chibi!William Turner threateningly-

And please give me challenges for future pseudo-episodes 'cause Rassilon knows I can't do it on my own. Well, I probably could, but only if I had considerably more time on my hands than I currently do. Which I don't. Obviously. And if I use your challenge you get dedicated! I won't be relying solely on you, probably more on Mum and Dad and maybe Jessa as well, but I would very much like your help.

And if you can think of a better title, that'd be good too.


	2. Alternatively, part II

Did you miss me?

**Disclaimer: **Doktor Wer ist nicht mein. -is sure she completely cocked up the grammar there, but give her a break, she hasn't really officially taken German-

SIAPNIAN: Sorry the last chapter was so short and crappy. . I have the flu and my brain feels like it's full of cotton balls, but there's nothing else to do but write...

And watch the entirety of Nine and Ten, but that's not the point.

And I'm still in Nine, so if Ten is OOC, blame him.

later

Okay, I'm not in Nine anymore, but... let's just blame it on the flu, yeah? OH And the fact that the Doctor is... well.

even later All right, so the flu's gone... erm... BLAME IT ON CHIBI!WILL!

-BAD WOLF-

The smile slowly fell from her face, her blood turning to ice water, numbing her soul. "...What?"

He gave her an impatient glance. "I could say it again, if you want," he offered.

She shook her head. "You mean... you don't... you don't remember me?"

He shrugged. "Never met you before in my life."

"But that's impossible, I was _there _on Satellite Five when you regenerated, you—"

His gaze hardened. "How do you know about that?" he ground out in a tone which chilled her further. "And more importantly, how are you still _alive? _The delta wave killed everything in its path, and I should know because I _was _in its path, and I definitely do not look like I did beforehand." He paused. "Not that I'm complaining," he added with a slightly cheeky grin.

She paused. "You never..." She paused again. "Oh," she added as something clicked, and pain stabbed through her. Just when she thought that nothing could get any worse...

"What? What's going on?"

She shook her head. "Long story," she said softly.

"Then tell it."

-BAD WOLF-

_Confused?_

_Ah, I should have known better than to tell you. Silly mortals. But the Black Guardian didn't want to listen and there's nothing better to do._

_Let me explain..._

_He took me out of her, but that didn't stop me. That couldn't stop me. Confined as I was to the TARDIS with the spaceship carefully locking me away in the dark where I could do "no harm", I was still alive. I made a promise to her, when she became the host for my power, that as long as I lived I would protect them, keep them together._

_I'm not one for breaking my promises._

_I tried to tell him, continued scattering my name wherever he walked in the hopes that he would let me free so I could heal them, but he didn't listen. He couldn't see._

_So I took matters into my own hands. Again._

_So he can't split the Void without other Time Lords?_

_Well._

_If there are no other Time Lords on one side of the Void, he would need at least a dozen, that is true. And don't start blathering to me about using his past selves, that's cheating, and would destroy the multiverse besides._

_No, it's not that simple._

_But it's not impossible to crack the Void safely, either._

_All that he needed was one Time Lord, just one, on the other side of the Void, and everything else would change._

_Ah, so you think I need Rose to do anything, do you? Well._

_Have you ever wondered at the number of "coincidences" in the Doctor's life? Why he survived the Time War when everyone else died? Why the plastic arm returned to Rose's flat, making him track the signal back and meet her properly? Why he asked her twice to come with him? Why the heart of the TARDIS opened just in time to defeat Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen and start the chain reaction leading to my creation? Why Jackie brought the tea into the ship with the Doctor inside? Why Mickey spilled it? Why it landed on just the right circuit to safely reduce it to steam and wake the Doctor without hurting the ship herself? Why the TARDIS fell to Pete's World in the first place? Why Rose stood tall and fearless before the Cult of Skaro, stared Dalek Sec right in the eyestalk and told him that we had killed his Emperor, without even a flinch? Why the Doctor appeared just in time to keep her from extermination? Why she stumbled in the first battle between the Daleks and Cybermen just at the right moment to avoid getting hit by a Cyberman's weapon? Why Pete changed his mind and went back, just in time to save her from hell? Why... All right, I see your eyes glazing over now. You get the point._

_I may be confined, but I am far from powerless._

_I needed to get to the other universe so I could begin, so I cracked the Void and threw the TARDIS through it. And if I knocked her about a bit in the process... Well, she never would have let me do what I needed to do, and I did keep her alive, after all._

_Pete's World, for lack of a better name, had its own Time War. All I needed to do was find the right moment, the right detail to change, and everything else would fall into place._

_I had done this before; I knew what to alter._

_The inferno consumed his planet, his people, everything in its path, and it would have consumed him. He flew his TARDIS right in front of it, wanting to be the first to go so he wouldn't feel the others' deaths, wouldn't hear the screams of those he had betrayed._

_All I did, both in our world and Pete's, was tweak his TARDIS, just a little bit. I made her... well, you wouldn't understand if I told you, so let's say I made her a little myopic._

_She missed the destination he had programmed by light-years, landing on a deserted moon far enough away so that they would be unaffected by the massacre._

_But not unaffected by the screams of the dying and the feeling of the warm lights against his soul all winking out within thirty seconds._

_He... Let's just say he didn't react very well._

_Not well at all, actually; he very calmly found the nearest cliff and walked straight off of it._

_But after he woke up again with his new body, he was too hopeless even to kill himself, and so he went on, alone._

_One detail changed, that was it, and from that small detail of his continued existence, he went and pissed off Queen Victoria and she created Torchwood._

_I knew that Rose wouldn't be able to resist Torchwood. One doesn't see what she had, experience what she had, and then just walk away from it all, back to chips and a job in a shop._

_Especially not her._

_All she had to do was follow her own desire to join Torchwood, and my work would be done; they had to run into each other at some point._

_Do you see now, my mortal friends?_

_Good._

_Then we'll continue._

-BAD WOLF-

She never had been able to resist him, so she let him lead her inside the TARDIS (The console and, indeed, the entire ship, was white and angular, which was strange. He gave her an odd look when she made a remark about redecorating), down slightly alien paths to the library.

Odd, really, that he should choose this place. They'd— well, she and _her _Doctor had always gone here when either of them needed comfort, and they would sit on the oddly-shaped but very comfortable couch and talk.

The couch was a little bit less alien than her Doctor's, but that made it even stranger to her. Still, nothing could be more unnerving than the man who looked like her Doctor and was _a _Doctor staring at her with eerily familiar dark amber eyes.

"It... it began when I was nineteen," she started hesitantly. She talked slowly, at first, then gradually more assuredly, never once looking him in the eyes because she knew that if she gave in to that temptation she would break down and that was the one thing she had sworn never to do.

Still, she couldn't keep the tremble out of her voice when she described the events at Dårlig ulv Stranden, and when he touched her hand in a comforting gesture it nearly broke her resolve.

She jerked away sharply, standing.

"You're not him," she said. "I can't..."

He looked at her, seeming hurt. He just wanted to help her, but he...

She turned and she ran, instinctively opening up to the TARDIS and allowing her little telepathic nudges to guide her back to the console room and outside the wrongness which was this universe...

She ran all the way back to Pete's mansion, dimly recognising that it was getting late, but not caring. She passed by her mum without a word, running to her room and curling into a tight ball on her bed, chaos running through her thoughts.

He was the Doctor, and she was the TARDIS, and that was everything she wanted, wasn't it? But they weren't the same. They weren't _hers._

But...

She choked on a sob.

"It's not fair," she whispered to the wall.

It didn't answer, and the sheer normality of this broke her even more.

She didn't sleep that night.

-BAD WOLF-

"Are you sure you're okay?"

Rose rolled her eyes in a manner reminiscent of the girl she had once been. "I'm _fine, _Mum."

"B—"

"I'm fine!" she insisted, shifting her satchel into a more comfortable position and stalking away.

At Torchwood, Yvonne gave her an odd look.

"Rose, are you all right?"

"Never been better," she muttered under her breath. "Fine," she added to Yvonne herself.

Yvonne looked unconvinced, but didn't pursue it. "There's something odd happening which I'd like your help with," she said.

"Odd how?"

"A week ago, a couple of teenagers were seen going towards the northern portal of the Clay Cross Tunnel, were never seen again. Didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary at the time, but earlier today a train went in one end and then just vanished."

Rose raised an eyebrow.

"We tried the tracking system already, and it didn't show up. Wherever it is, either the system is dead, which isn't supposed to be possible, or it's not on Earth, but we haven't been able to find any spaceships nearby."

"Cloaking device?" suggested Rose.

"If it is, we haven't seen it before."

Rose nodded. "So you want me to go over there and find out what it is?"

"If you would. And take Addie or Gareth with you. We don't want to lose you."

She nodded again and went to find Adeola.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor kicked the console as it beeped at him.

"What's wrong with you?" he demanded. "You never used to be like this..."

The ship gave him an irritated flicker of thought.

"All right, I'll give you that, but _every time? _You aren't old enough to malfunction this much. Close, but—"

The console gave a sulky beep and the lights dimmed slightly.

"All right, I'm sorry, but—" He sighed, fighting a growing urge to bang his head against the wall. "Can you just get me somewhere near where I'm going, and that's a _human's _definition of 'near' I'm going for, so no dropping me off a couple of galaxies over. And in the right time period."

Silence.

"Please?"

The lights came back on and the short column in the centre of the console started to move, and the Doctor grinned.

With a sulky shudder the TARDIS stopped moving and he ran his fingertips lightly over the console before picking his coat up from the floor and pulling it on as he ran out of the door.

Maybe that Rose person was right, he mused; it might be nice to have somewhere besides the floor and the console to throw his coat... He loved that coat. Janice Joplin gave him that coat...

Wasn't he supposed to be doing something?

Ah. Yes. Spacio-temporal disturbances. Eddies in the space-time continuum. Weird bits of wibbly-wobbliness hanging around in time and space.

He found the sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the dark space inside the tunnel, trying to understand the whirring it gave him as the sonic waves were caught up inside the disturbance. Apparently...

"What are you doing here?"

He whipped around, startled, to face an equally startled Rose.

"Trying to figure out what's been stealing random teenagers and trains. You?"

"Same."

He raised an eyebrow. "What, you do this for fun?"

"Isn't that what you do?" she shot back.

"Rose, I _really _wish you wouldn't keep on going ahead of me..." came a voice before the owner stumbled into view. "Oh," she added. "Who's your friend?"

Only the Doctor saw Rose's mild flinch. "He's..." She trailed off, glancing momentarily at him, silently asking for assistance.

"I'm just a friend, passing through, trying to help out a bit," he said to the probably-attractive (Hey, she was human. He couldn't tell. Well, Rose was... but that wasn't the point.) dark-skinned girl who had appeared.

"It's fine, Addie," Rose interrupted the girl, who had opened her mouth to speak. "He's safe."

Addie closed her mouth again and shrugged, whereupon the blonde turned back to the Doctor. "So, you've been here longer than we have," she started, seemingly all calm and professionalism, but he could see the pain behind her eyes; pain at something she could see right before her, but could never have.

He knew the feeling.

"Only been here for a few seconds, so I dunno."

"Oh, shut up. I know you, you've saved entire galaxies in less time than that.," she scoffed.

He blinked. "Well, you wouldn't understand—" he attempted.

"Try me."

He paused, then obeyed. "There's a spacio-temporal disturbance inside the tunnel, which acts as a secondary transmat system—"

Rose winced. "Ooh. I was in one once. Wasn't fun."

"—transporting anyone who gets too close across space-time."

Rose nodded. "So... it's a disturbance in time and space which takes people from here and sticks them somewhere else?"

The Doctor frowned slightly. "It sounded better the way I said it," he muttered. "But yes, basically."

She nodded again, almost smiling. "Any idea who's behind it?"

The Doctor grinned. "One way of finding out," he said, grabbed her hand and ran for the tunnel.

-BAD WOLF-

There! I compensated for the short chapter.

You're probably going to bug me now and try to get me to make ALL my chapters this long, aren't you?

Well. I'll try.

But only if you review.


	3. Alternatively, part III

You know, it's so depressing when I have to start a new chapter and all my work on the last one is erased with one tap of the backspace key... Well, on here it says "delete", but that's not the point.

**Disclaimer: **I asked them. They laughed at me. :'( So now I just have chibi!alt!Doctor... And chibi!Will. And chibi!Sylar's eating my hair. But I don't have Doctor Who.

**Dedication: **Right, so the episode itself is dedicated to my father, but this CHAPTER is dedicated to Savannah (aka TCASM aka The Chibi's Are Stalking Me aka Seshat - She Who Is The Scribe aka I've Lost My Profile Page aka...) 'cause it's her birthday today (I think... Either it's today or my forgetful tendencies are running wild again.) and I'm updating everything I can while trying to lengthen my chapters, because I can't give her back her profile...

**WARNING:** I played a game with this chapter. It was called "Pick the First Alien that Makes Sense with the Plotline because the Author is Too Tired and/or Lazy to Think Up Her Own Right Now".

-BAD WOLF-

_Ah, you've come back! I was almost afraid you wouldn't._

_Well, since you're here, we'd better get on with it before your attention span vanishes. I never understood mortal attention spans; they're always too short to be of any use..._

_...Where was I?_

_Oh. Right._

-BAD WOLF-

Going through a secondary transmat system hadn't been fun the first time, and the first time she hadn't even fully appreciated the "secondary" part of the name.

She was torn apart cell by cell; each individual atom was scanned and then burned and discarded. Her mind was wrenched forcefully out of her body, then it and the data required to reconstruct her was transferred across time and space— emailed, she thought with a mental half-smile— to another computer.

And then the "secondary" part of the name started.

Her mind was left to float aimlessly in the sea of numbers which would allow the computer to rebuild her, trapped, but not tied down to anything.

She wasn't sure how long she sat there, but as soon as her consciousness decided to settle down and call the computer home it was torn away again and thrust into her body once more— while it was still under construction.

As soon as the process was over her reconstructed legs gave out and she started to fall, but never actually managed to hit the ground.

"Ooh, careful," said the not-quite-Doctor as he caught her. She clutched weakly at his arms for balance as the room spun around her and for a moment she could pretend that the not-quite-Doctor was the Doctor, and that she had finally come home.

But as he pulled her to her feet, she caught a glimpse of his eyes and the fantasy shattered.

They were warm, yes; they were concerned, but they lacked that deeper, darker emotion with which her Doctor had always gazed at her— that shadow which gave her the impression that _she _was all that mattered.

"You all right?" inquired the not-Doctor.

"Yeah," she replied, disentangling herself from him to prove her point. Her legs are still a little shaky, but she'd rather stand on her own than be close to this not-Doctor.

"Time travel without a capsule will do that to you. Forgot to warn you." He looked mildly guilty. "Sorry."

She shook her head. "It's all right."

The not-quite-Doctor blinked. "Tell you what," he said tersely, "let's get out of the way." He wrapped his fingers around her forearm and led her away from the transmat machine a few moments before several more people came through them.

"Thanks."

"No problem. Now..." He turned around, squinting at the ceiling. "We're on a spaceship of some kind— actually, more like movable space station, it's _massive._"

"Any idea who built it?"

"Can't tell from here, but it looks a bit Racnoss. Funny, really; I thought they'd been wiped out long ago..." He paused. "Well, s'pose nothing stays dead around me except the things I want to bring back."

She bit her lip, resisting the urge to try to comfort him any way she could.

"Tell you what," he said, suddenly slipping into flippancy. "Let's go this way." He wandered off in an apparently random direction, and Rose was left with no choice but to follow as more people were transmatted in and started panicking.

"What're the Racnoss?" she inquired, having to run for a few moments to catch up to the Doctor.

"Big spider-thingies. They're omnivores, they devoured entire planets. I thought they'd all been killed, but apparently not..." He turned and started walking in a different direction. "Might not be the Racnoss anyway."

"What do they want with us, though?"

He turned back to her. "Food," he said as if it was perfectly self-explanatory. "They're going to pick off the population one by one so that nobody can fight back, and then they're going to invade the planet itself." He paused. "You know, they steal one or two people or a train, and then the people who could stop them go blundering in to investigate—"

"Oi! You fell in too!"

He sent her a glare. "Ran," he corrected her. "I _ran _in. Anyway, the people who can stop them go in, they eat them, the people who can rescue the people who can stop them go in, they eat them..."

"And then they just go after the entire planet?"

"Basically, yeah." He wandered off again, tapping at a wall coated with spider-webs. "Yeah," he repeated.

"What? What is it?"

"Definitely a Racnoss ship. Their webs are surprisingly strong, they build their spaceships out of them."

Rose frowned. "Doesn't that, I dunno, leave a bunch of holes in it?"

He gave her an impatient look. "They aren't just spiders, Rose," he said irritably. "They can seal their webs together so it's airtight. Engine, propulsion system, controls, everything's built out of this stuff."

"How many Racnoss?" she asked, touching the wall herself. It was smooth and silky and ever-so-slightly sticky.

"No way of telling. Could be as few as ten or as many as two thousand, depending on the size of the ship, but judging by the sound of the engines, I'd say it's closer to two thousand."

Rose shivered slightly. "Any way of stopping them?"

He paused, then gave her a smile. "I'll think of something," he said, and walked past her again, shoving a couple of bewildered people out of the way. "So, Rose Tyler," he said, scanning the door with his sonic screwdriver, "why were you at the disturbance?"

"Same as you. Trying to figure out what it was."

"Ah, but that implies that you are one of those people who could possibly stop this from happening."

"I'm with Torchwood," she said in explanation.

The not-quite-Doctor winced. "Oh." He paused. "Does that mean you're going to try to kidnap me?"

Rose laughed. "No, it's different now. It's changed, since..." She paused. "Well. Everything."

The not-quite-Doctor glanced over his shoulder. "Canary Wharf?" he inquired.

She nodded.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly.

She nodded again, forcing the pain back. "What are you doing?" she inquired of him.

"Trying to find a way out so we can find the Racnoss and..." He paused. "Yeah, that's as far as it goes, actually."

She rolled her eyes at him.

He gave a triumphant cry as the door slid open, then put the screwdriver back in his pocket and walked down the corridor as the door slid shut behind them.

"Shouldn't we... let them out or something?" asked Rose, gesturing back to the door.

"They're safe there as long as the Racnoss don't come and get them, and I haven't seen any yet." He paused. "Which is weird, actually; I thought we'd have found one by now..."

"Maybe it's a really big ship but most of the Racnoss died," suggested Rose, tilting her head to look at the ceiling.

He glanced back. "Good point." He could see why his alternate self chose her; she was clever... Well. He'd rather be on his own, but... She seemed worth at least a trip. Definitely more than Earth could give her, even when she was with Torchwood.

"So," he said. "How long have you been with Torchwood?"

"Six months. Once you see everything, the size of it all..." She trailed off. "You can't just leave it behind, you know?"

He grinned. "Yeah."

She paused. "On Satellite Five... what happened? With you?"

His smile faded. "I used the delta wave, it killed me and everything else in a surprisingly large area around the Satellite, I regenerated, I wandered off, that's all you need to know." He paused. "Does it matter?"

She shook her head. "No. Just curious."

He turned a random corner. The lack of Racnoss concerned him; it was almost as if they didn't want to be found... He had thought that he had escaped the cages unnoticed, but if they had seen...

Lost in his wonderings, he didn't see the Racnoss until they were a few metres in front of him.

"Ah, clever humans escaped the cage, clever," hissed one of the spiderlike creatures.

"We feed early," said a second, and they started to advance.

The Doctor instinctively grabbed Rose's hand.

_"Run!" _he ordered. Startled, she obeyed.

They ran along the dismal greyish corridors until the Doctor found another hallway, pulling her quickly to the right and dashing across the ever-so-slightly sticky floor.

He skidded to a halt as the hallway came to an end, a stark wall in their way.

"All right, maybe that one wasn't a good idea," he said before turning and trying to go back.

But the Racnoss had already caught up with them and were slowly, malevolently clicking towards them.

"Now we can feast," snarled the first one happily.

"Ah, now, you really want to think about that," said the Doctor, backing towards the wall. "We can help you. Do you really want to eat someone who can help?"

"Human thinks he can talk himself out of death," chuckled a Racnoss.

"Your transmat," he said. "It's not working properly, is it? It should have waited until we were very firmly out of the way before transmatting more people in, but I only figured out that we should go away because I heard it powering up. We nearly got spliced with two other people, didn't we, Rose?"

"Yep."

"And that would really mess up the rest of your meat, if the others weren't as observant as me, and of course nobody could be."

The Racnoss paused, cocking their arachnidian heads to the side.

The Doctor relaxed slightly. "I can fix it for you," he said. "All I ask is that you keep Rose and I alive, if only until it's finished."

"Why must we keep her alive?" inquired one of the arachnoids. "If you are the only one who can help us..."

"There have to be two people to fix it," said Rose quickly.

"She's vital. And if you kill her, I won't do anything."

The words spilled from his lips before he had thought them through, and it surprised him. He barely knew her— true, his alternate self had known and trusted her and, judging by what she had said, loved her, but he himself had only met her the previous day. And even then she had run away from him. And now he had said he'd die to keep her alive?

She didn't have some sort of mind-control over him, did she? He wouldn't be surprised, what with his alternate self practically begging her to come with him. True, he had never been refused before and that was odd, but if a potential companion refused, that was it; he was gone, and he never looked back. None of his selves ever did. But the ninth one, the least likely to beg anything from anyone, who had insisted to himself and his TARDIS that he just wanted to be alone...

Still, he could puzzle over that later. Right now they were in danger.

_They! _There it was again! He fought an increasing urge to bang his head against the wall.

The Racnoss looked at each other, hissing slightly. Two of them stepped forwards and the Doctor and Rose backed up slightly, fearing that he hadn't actually convinced them not to eat them, but the creatures just stepped over them to stand behind them.

"Try to escape and we will devour you," the Racnoss before them informed them, turning around slowly before starting to walk.

"Wouldn't dream of it," replied the Doctor with mock severity before grinning momentarily at Rose and following the arachnoid out of the dead-end and back into the main corridor.

"So," he said conversationally. "How many of you are there?"

"One hundred and sixty-seven," answered the creature before them, who the Doctor spontaneously decided to call Sadie.

"And the children," reminded one of the Racnoss behind them, which he dubbed Fred.

"But this ship is massive," objected the Doctor. "I would have thought..."

"The others were murdered," snarled Sadie.

"Really? By who?" he inquired, feigning ignorance.

"The Time Lords," hissed Carrie. "They hunted us, _murdered _us. We are the only ones left."

"But now they are extinct," said Sadie smugly. "They cannot stop us now. We are victorious."

The Doctor clenched his jaw to avoid snapping back at them with something which would completely destroy his facade. To them, he was a knowledgeable human, nothing more.

Rose glanced up at him. "I'm sorry," she murmured.

He just nodded.

"I'll get us out," he whispered, his voice barely audible. "Whatever happens, I'm getting both you and I out of this alive. I promise."

She nodded, but her fear was readily apparent. She had trusted his alternate self, he knew that, so didn't she trust him? He was exactly the same, as far as he could tell... Well, judging by her description, his alternate self wasn't quite as depressed, but still.

So what, he had to prove himself again?

He paused. Judging by her stammering tale, her alternate mother and father had been nothing like her own parents. She was probably expecting the same sort of change in him. She was lost and confused and probably didn't know how to react to any of this.

Before he realised what he was doing, he had reached out and taken her hand in a hopefully comforting gesture. She glanced up at him, seeming almost surprised, but didn't pull away like she had previously.

That was an improvement, he thought, and the spent the rest of the walk in relative silence.

-BAD WOLF-

-bangs head on desk- It's harder than everyone else makes it look, to say so much while not actually advancing the plot a lot... Ooh, look, I rhymed. Sort of.

Review or I let chibi!alt!Doctor have a box of rubber bands.


	4. Alternatively, part IV

Greetings, bipedal life-forms everywhere!

**Disclaimer: **I own... -counts- Five chibis, I think, and I'm being stalked by two more. But I don't own Doctor Who.

SIAPNIAN: Happy Easter, meine Freunde! Ich liebe Dich alle!

**WARNING: **I've got a headache.

-later- All right, I don't have a headache any more.

-BAD WOLF-

_I had thought that my plan was foolproof. I had thought that the alternate Doctor would just drop her off back home and go on with his life. I had thought..._

_Well. I never did truly understand mortals._

_I hadn't taken into account how much the Doctor needed Rose just to maintain his sanity. Oh, I knew he shattered the moment she wasn't by his side, but I thought that that was just because he loved her._

_No, it runs more deeply than that, so deeply that even I hadn't fully appreciated the nuances of his adoration. Even in the alternate Doctor. He _needs _her like he needs to breathe. Always has, although none of his selves would admit it, and he always will. The poor alternate Doctor had never met Rose; she had never existed. I thought that this would assist my plan; the more his wounds festered untreated, the more he would want to be left alone. But he's clever enough to know the cure for his pain when he sees it— or her, rather._

_And he was hurting enough to be selfish, to want to keep her all for himself. I suppose I don't blame him, really. He's clever— too clever, sometimes. And this Doctor has more common sense than the one Rose and I know and love. He knew the moment he talked to her for the first time that there was something in this girl that could save him._

_Have you ever lost everything you ever thought you had? Was it then destroyed with no hope of return?_

_Multiply that by a million. Try having its destruction be your fault, and then living with it, all on your own, for centuries._

_And then try having to be responsible for the death of one species and the decimation of another, all in one second— again._

_Now. Imagine that you've found someone who can help you, heal you._

_Would you not take the opportunity for painlessness no matter the cost?_

_This is the detail I overlooked; that Doctor had undergone too much pain, with nothing to stop it from destroying him, and it had driven him nearly mad._

_This is where my plan went wrong._

_This is where I was forced to watch, helpless— me, helpless!— as the alternate Doctor refused to let Rose go, and be powerless to stop him._

_This is where promises break and lies take their place._

_This is where sanity flees and madness flourishes._

_This is the point of no return._

_This is where I lost control._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose hadn't had such a boring walk in a very long time. She'd been taken prisoner before, yes, but never in a ship this big, and never this far from where she was being transported.

She had never really been looked at and recognised as anything particularly interesting or useful, either. Maybe this was normal for the Doctor when he was captured.

She wondered how he could stand it. Gallifreyan or no, he had to get tired sometime, and "sometime" for her had passed a very long time ago.

If she was running, the adrenaline would have kept her from noticing the little aches and complaints of her legs and feet, but this was just... Frightening, yes, in a way. Frightening because she had no idea what to do once the Racnoss saw through the not-quite-Doctor's lies. Make it up as she went along, she supposed, but that assumption hardly helped. Months with Torchwood, where almost everything was very carefully planned in advance, had ruined her. And yet this mild worry was nowhere near enough to properly scare her.

Maybe a few years ago. Maybe the innocent shop-girl who had never known excitement or the pain which went hand-in-hand with it would have been frightened. But people changed— those connected with the Doctor most of all—and she wasn't that person any more.

She winced and stumbled as pain shot through her foot and the not-quite-Doctor pulled slightly at her hand to help her regain her balance.

He had been holding her hand for at least half an hour now, and she still wasn't sure how she felt about it. If she didn't think about it, she could pretend that it was her Doctor's and be comforted, even if her heart raced at even such a harmless contact. If she did think about it, her head spun and her heart raced from fear. What if she became attached to this Doctor in this one adventure— she of all people should know that it could very easily happen—and he just dropped her back on this Earth? What would that do to her? But he had taken her hand... He had to at least pity her, then. So... What if it was more than that? What if he asked her to come with him? What would she say? What would it do to her if she said yes? Would it drive her mad, having the Doctor so close and yet still so very far away? What if this Doctor wasn't the same as her Doctor and she went with him? The rest of this universe was cruel. Was its Doctor the same, or was he the one respite from the harshness? What if...

She decided to just not think about it.

The not-quite-Doctor squeezed her hand briefly, as if sensing her inner turmoil, before letting go of it as the passage finally opened up and light prevented the gesture from going unnoticed by the Racnoss— although why the spider-like creatures would care, Rose had no idea.

Speaking of the Racnoss, Rose could see why they hadn't seen any on their way here. The massive red-and-black arachnids were all over the room. "Room" didn't quite do it justice, though; it was more like a tower, several storeys high, with webs creating ladders and pathways of sorts across the open space. On every pathway, there was at least one Racnoss. One of the hastily built spans of web creaked ominously under the weight of three of the creatures and Rose glanced up nervously, but one of the arachnoids stepped off and the webbing stopped its noise.

"Nice place," said the not-quite-Doctor flippantly, running his fingers through his hair to keep it from his face in a painfully familiar gesture.

Several of the Racnoss turned to face them at his speech, and the Doctor paused, looking almost nervous for a moment.

"Who are these people?" demanded one of the creatures, larger than the rest, as she laboriously turned her massive body around to face them.

"They escaped the cage, Empress," said one of their Racnoss. "This one says he can fix our transmat."

"Hello," said the not-quite-Doctor cheerfully.

"The transmat is broken?" hissed the Empress.

"They witnessed an error."

"Explain," said the Empress, turning her black eyes on the not-quite-Doctor.

"Ah, yes. See, your transmat didn't wait until we were out of the way before trying to shove other people in on top. Should be easy to fix, for humans. Dunno how it got that way, though, unless this is a battleship. Is this a battleship? You wouldn't happen to have been in a fight recently, would you?"

His eyes had hardened, and Rose could sense the hatred behind them.

So this Doctor _was _as cruel as his universe.

Rose thought she would scream at the sheer unfairness of it all. Maybe later, when she was alone in the bedroom she still couldn't bring herself to call hers, she could bury her head in the pillow and do it then.

It wouldn't be the first time.

"Stuff gets knocked around in space battles," he added quietly. "Things break. You never really know what might happen."

The Empress glared at him. "And what is the other human here for?"

"I need her," said the not-Doctor.

Those same words would have completely enchanted her... if they had come from the Doctor.

The Empress hissed. "Very well," she said before pointing a leg in the direction of a mass of wires and controls which looked like some kid's science project.

The not-Doctor grinned his thanks and wandered over to it, squinting momentarily at it before sitting down beside it. Rose crouched next to him, close enough to whisper but not too close.

"She just bought it? Like that?"

"Time Lord mind trick. Like the Jedi mind trick, only more subtle." He took a handful of wires and winced at them. "Here, hold these. Untangle them if you can."

She obeyed, narrowing her eyes at the mess before trying to isolate the wires into some semblance of neatness. She wondered for a moment if this Doctor had a neat streak or whether he was just trying to make her look useful so she wouldn't get eaten.

She wondered if she cared, and realised she didn't.

"There's nothing wrong with the transmat, is there?" she murmured under her breath as a Racnoss passed by, hissing at them before moving on to a more reassuring distance.

The not-quite-Doctor glanced up at her. "No."

"Aren't they going to figure it out soon?"

"Probably," he said, blowing dust off of a receptacle of some kind.

"Right. So how are we going to get out once they find out you lied?" She paused. "Why are we here anyway? Why'd you use the transmat as an excuse to get them not to eat us?"

"One, it was handy. Two, I wanted to stop it from working so that they won't take anyone else. Three, if I am very very clever—"

"And you're brilliant," she said automatically.

He grinned momentarily. "Exactly. And if I can figure out how to reverse it, that'll send everyone back."

"Does that include us?"

The not-quite-Doctor frowned at the no-longer-dusty receptacle before using the screwdriver on it briefly. "Maybe. Hope so."

"What about the Racnoss?"

He glanced up at her. "What do you mean? What about them?" He took one of the wires from her, very effectively tangling the entire bunch again.

"Will they get caught in the transmat too?"

"Nah. Well, they would normally, but I can change that." He handed her the receptacle and used the screwdriver on the wire he had just inserted into it.

It sparked momentarily and Rose flinched, glancing up nervously, but the Racnoss hadn't seen it.

All was silent for a time apart from the clicks of the arachnoids' legs on rock-solid webs, the creaks of the hastily woven pathways and the buzz of the screwdriver.

"By the way," said the not-quite-Doctor without warning, "I've no idea how we get out of here."

"The transmat doesn't cover us?"

"Nope." He turned the receptacle over in his hands and took another wire from her.

Rose nodded slowly before pulling out her mobile, unconsciously slipping her tongue between her lips as she selected the correct number and dialled.

Yvonne answered. "Rose, at last! You've been missing for weeks. What happened?"

Rose winced as a Racnoss came a little too close for comfort. "Yeah, can't explain right now," she murmured. Yvonne could probably only just hear her, but she'd rather be misheard than found out at this point. "Can you see me, or locate me, or find the phone or something?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Well..." She paused. "A friend of mine and I are currently trapped on a spaceship with a bunch of spiders who are really loving the idea of eating us as soon as we fix their transmat which isn't actually broken, so when he manages to send everyone back could you teleport us down?"

"Depends what species your friend is."

"He looks like us. Same size, shape, everything."

Yvonne paused. "I can try to get you both. Is he safe? Does he know about Torchwood?"

Rose barely smirked. "You could say that, yeah."

Yvonne's voice became muffled. "Matt, locate Rose's phone. We need to lock on to her with a teleport and get her down here when she says so. She's got a friend with her, looks human but apparently isn't." A pause. "I know. Can you just try?" Another pause. "All right. Rose, we're getting there," she said, her voice clear now.

Without warning, the Doctor grinned. "Oh, brilliant," he murmured, taking the receptacle back from her, turning it over and flipping a switch. Power hummed throughout the spaceship suddenly, then died down.

"Did you do it?" inquired Rose breathlessly.

"What?" asked Yvonne. "What's happening?"

A Racnoss clicked. "Empress, the prisoners are gone!"

The Empress turned to the Doctor. "He tricked us!" she shrieked, clicking slowly towards them.

"Ah, now," said the Doctor, getting up and backing away from the creatures.

Rose mimicked his movements, unconsciously inching closer to him. "Yvonne, now would be a _really _good time..."

"It would help if you'd stop moving," she said crossly.

"Yeah, well, I'm being stalked by giant spiders right now, so..."

"Now, um," said the Doctor. "You really can't kill us now. I mean, really..."

"You tricked us!" hissed the Empress, reaching out to them, her clawlike forearms glinting evilly in the light. Rose absently wondered if she had gotten bigger, and why the light suddenly didn't seem quite as bright as it did before.

The Doctor opened his mouth, then paused. "Yeah, you've got me there," he acceded. "Rose, when's Torchwood coming to get us?" he inquired, his voice oddly tight.

"Soon, I hope," she replied shortly, flinching as the Racnoss advanced, their bulk making them thankfully slow. The Empress was near enough to catch them, her claws raised for the blows, while the other Racnoss hemmed them in, pinning them between the transmat system and the wall of arachnoid.

"Well," said the Doctor, "it was nice meeting you, Rose."

She gave a mirthless laugh. "Nice meeting you again, Doctor."

"Almost there," said Yvonne.

"Too late," muttered Rose quietly. She looked at the talons and wondered if her death would be painless.

She supposed she wouldn't care once she was dead.

She grabbed the Doctor's hand and closed her eyes as the Empress came down, claw-first.

Searing pain tore through every cell and she couldn't even scream as the world faded to black around them.

-BAD WOLF-

Wow, that was weird. Thought that this chapter and the next would be one, and I ended up rambling so much in this one that I have enough material for another! O.o

Sorry for the cliffie. I really, truly am. Really. Cross my hearts. -crosses hearts- But the next chapter should be up fairly quickly and I wanted a good ramble in that one, so I figured why not?

Right, so I just gave you an Easter gift with an update storm, now could you be the lovely people I know you are and return the favour with a review storm? Please? -pleading look-

OH! I almost forgot! is being nice to me for some reason; I can edit the documents directly now! WHICH MEANS I CAN ALTER MY PROFILE AGAIN!! -runs around screaming-

-coughs- Anyway.

An auspicious Otherstide to you. When is Otherstide, anyway? I looked it up, but Wikipedia didn't know. -sob-

Anyway. Happy Easter, everyone. I love you all. -hugs-


	5. Alternatively, part V

Aand I'm out!

Hold on, how many knew I was in? ...Probably not many, as I hid the news in a Monk oneshot. X( Catch me doing that again... Anyway. Yes, I'm taking the note off of the drabble in question. Thing is, I got into the hospital on Saturday, but I'm out now. Yay!

**Disclaimer: **I own Lyneea, but she's not even in this story.

SIAPNIAN: -announcer voice- And now the conclusion. -theme music- ...Wait, I have no theme music. AAAAGH! -panics-

-BAD WOLF-

Slowly the pain faded away, leaving only a vague dizziness, and Rose dared to open her eyes.

Smooth white walls, a hastily-set-up teleport system, Yvonne and Matt looking relieved, a completely unharmed Doctor.

They had escaped.

"Matt, can you lock on to the ship and shoot it down?" inquired Yvonne, giving Rose a quick smile.

The human in question opened his mouth, but was interrupted.

"No need," said the Doctor. "While I was sending everyone back home, I messed with their engines. They should be out of range by now."

"Where'd you send them?" asked Rose.

He shrugged. "Dunno. Somewhere that's not here."

And he walked away, Rose pausing before following him.

-BAD WOLF-

_Did I worry you?_

_Sorry. I was worried myself for a bit there. I tend to panic a bit when I'm not in complete control of absolutely everything. It is my job, after all._

_All right, so I may have nudged that a bit, but that's all I can do from here. Nudge. And even then, the nudges might not work. It's a delicate process, playing with events in a different universe while trying not to make the multiverse implode, thank you very much, and I'd like to see you try it._

-BAD WOLF-

They went to the TARDIS, which was actually a lot easier than Rose thought it would be, as the space-timeship had decided to repark herself in the nearest area which bore any sort of resemblance to an alleyway.

"Why'd she do that?" Rose asked as they entered. The whiteness and angularness of the ship still disturbed her slightly, but it felt less alien than it had beforehand.

"Move?" The Doctor glanced at her momentarily and grinned. "She likes you. Weird, really, she doesn't like a lot of people."

She considered this sentence and decided that it was a compliment.

"Then again, the other TARDIS liked you. And you did save my life. Thanks for that, by the way," he added as an afterthought. "Sometimes hard to get out alive on my own."

She wondered if that was an invitation, and decided that she didn't have enough information to decide.

"No problem," she told him, then paused. "Wait, where are we going?"

He glanced up, his features slipping into a blank expression. "Pete Tyler's place. Taking you back home."

A small part of her wondered if she wasn't already there. The rest of her shivered in pain. She'd been so worried about what she would say if he asked her to come with him, and she had hardly considered the possibility that he might not want her there at all. Saving his life had been enough the first time, but it had been considerably more dramatic then and it had been her doing. And yes, she had been questioning whether or not she would even come with him, but if this Doctor didn't want her and he was anything like her Doctor, then what if her Doctor hadn't wanted her? It would explain Reinette... and his attempt to send her here while there was still the second magnaclamp, still the chance that she would make it...

She mimicked his blank expression to disguise the dark emotions swirling through her.

Distract yourself, Rose. Change the subject. Get away before you break.

She thought, and confusion seeped over her features. "Wait, you know where I live?" she asked, dumbfounded. Yes, she was considerably more famous than she had been before she ended up in the parallel world, but after the initial inquiry after her origins she'd pretty much been ignored— and she'd never known her Doctor to be much for celebrities. Not even minor ones.

"Well..." He looked almost sheepish. "There was the whole Cybus thing targeting your mother's birthday party, and then she died, and then whoops, she's back again and ooh look! She's got a twenty-one-year-old daughter who you never heard of before, bears a surprising resemblance to one of the servants at said birthday party and who also just happens to work for Torchwood, but never mind that. And then there was the breach which opened in Norway, then closed again, right at the point of your family's spontaneous vacation there..."

Rose flinched inwardly at the reminder. He didn't seem to notice.

"You seemed to attract trouble, so I figured I should watch you in case I had nothing to do one day."

She almost smiled at his hasty ramble.

Almost.

And then the column stopped moving.

The Doctor stepped away from the controls, hands in his pockets in a painfully familiar gesture, staring at the ground.

Rose chewed on her lip. "Guess... guess this is good-bye, then," she said resignedly.

He glanced up. "If you want it to be."

She blinked.

"Come with me?" he inquired, voice barely reaching her from where she stood on the other side of the room.

Time froze.

All right, so maybe she shouldn't have stopped thinking about what she would say if placed in this scenario.

"Can I think about it?" she blurted before she had really thought about the question, then bit her lip again.

He blinked, but nodded amicably. "I'll be back tomorrow," he told her.

"I'll still be here." She smiled momentarily at him before turning and walking out of the doors, then turning around again to watch the ship dematerialise.

As the TARDIS completely faded away with a mournful screech, Rose panicked. Was he really going to come back, or was he taking her answer as a no? What if he forgot about her? What if he...

She shook herself sharply, disentangling herself from the shrubbery he had managed to park in before trying to remember where the door was.

She found it eventually and went inside the house. Almost immediately, Jackie appeared at the top of the stairs before screeching loudly enough to impress a harpy and running down at dangerous speeds to engulf her in a crushing hug.

"You've been missing for _weeks_!" she shrieked directly in Rose's ear. "I thought you'd died! Nobody knew where you were, everybody was panicking..."

"I'm fine," she told her, disentangling herself slightly— not enough to offend her mother, but enough to allow herself to breathe. Breathing was good, she recalled telling her Doctor once. He had laughed about it later— agreed wholeheartedly with the advice, but found it amusing nonetheless. And... her mum was talking again.

"What happened?"

The ghost of a true smile flickered over Rose's lips, an extremely rare expression which obviously puzzled Jackie. "I met him again, Mum," she whispered.

"What do you mean? Met who?"

"The Doctor."

-BAD WOLF-

It took ages for her to satisfactorily explain the situation to her mother, and longer for her to translate said parent's rapid attempt at explaining the same to Pete and Mickey, but eventually she managed to get away.

She lay curled on her bed, staring at the ceiling, which happened to have a skylight in it. It had been thought that if she could see the stars it might help her, but she had always thought that the pinpricks of light were mocking her, taunting her with what she used to have.

What did she want?

She wanted her Doctor back, she replied instantly.

Impossible.

Okay, so what would her Doctor want?

She chewed her lip. He'd said it before, more times than she would have liked; he'd said that if they ever got separated, which was more than likely, then she should do her best to have the most brilliant life she could.

She couldn't have a fantastic life without him, though.

But wasn't that exactly what she was being offered? A chance to start again? He might not be _her _Doctor, and she might not love him the way she did the other him, but she was addicted now. She _had _to travel, the same way she had to breathe— more so, almost.

But could her sanity take it, seeing the Doctor so close and yet somehow further than ever?

Did her sanity even matter?

_Was _she sane? Or was her sane actually insane, and her insane actually sane? She didn't feel very sane. So was she? Or...

What did it matter, anyway?

Her mum would want her to stay. Mickey too, and her dad. Torchwood needed her. She shouldn't go; she had things she had to do, things that nobody else could be trusted with or even understand in some cases. That first gift of the TARDIS, the translation, had never faded and she had stopped many a war through avoiding the misunderstandings which always seemed to happen with people who couldn't instantly understand anything said to them.

She wondered why that effect had stayed. Whenever she thought about it, her head started to spin and she got vague memories of golden light and rage and pain before she got the intense and irresistible urge to not think about it any more— an urge which she happily obeyed.

Where was she?

Ah. Right.

She couldn't go.

But she wanted to go. What happened to doing what she wanted? Not Jackie, not Pete, not Mickey or Yvonne or Jake or anyone else, just her, Dame Rose Tyler of the Powell Estate. How long had it been since she gave in to what she wanted?

How long had it been since she'd touched a star, walked on alien soil, saved the world for fun— not because she had to, but just because she wanted the thrill of it all? Wasn't it her turn?

She had to leave.

She couldn't leave.

It took a long time for the chaos in her head to subside, but by the time she fell asleep, she knew what it was she had to do.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor drummed his fingertips on the console, trying to distract himself.

She was a human. A clever human, yes. A useful human, yes. A beautiful—

She was a human. If she said no, then there would always be another person clever and useful enough to be his companion. There were millions of deserving creatures throughout history on this planet alone. He knew this. If she didn't come with him, it wouldn't be a big deal.

_Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap..._

So why was he so worried about it? Why did it have to be _her?_ Why did he get that nagging sense that, if she refused, he would just have to ask again?

_Because she's Rose, _said some vague part of him.

_...Tap-tap-tap-tap._

That made sense. She was Rose, and she had some sort of mind control over him. Of course.

_Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap..._

He forced his fingers to still, told himself to wait.

His fingers disobeyed, and himself was going the same way.

She wanted to think. That was a good idea. He should think as well, make sure that he was perfectly okay with having a companion with innate telepathic abilities which were aimed towards him.

He thought about it.

A second passed, then another.

_Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap._

Yeah, he was fine with it.

His fingers flickered towards the lever which would send him towards the co-ordinates he had unconsciously set several minutes previously before he noticed what they were doing and stopped them.

_Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap._

Distract, distract, distract. Distract, he told himself sternly.

The TARDIS gave a muffled laugh.

He glared at her.

And his hand went over to the controls.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose sat on the lawn, knees to her chin, eyes on the same spot where he had landed the first time. She knew the TARDIS was a creature of habit and was likely to land there again, although she had some difficulty convincing other people of that fact.

_She _knew he was coming. And _she _knew that the ship would land right there, right where she had the previous day. If her family and Mickey couldn't understand how she knew... Well. They'd see.

Hopefully.

"Maybe he's not coming back," suggested Mickey, glancing up at the sky, where the sun had perceptibly moved. Rose had been there since the earliest possible moment her Doctor had considered as "day" and was obviously planning on remaining there until the earliest possible moment her Doctor had considered as "night". Mickey had been there for most of that time and his legs had long since ceased to talk to him. He looked over at her, but she seemed completely unaffected by the hours. He wished he knew how she could wait so quietly and patiently; his back was killing him and he was bored out of his mind. But someone had to be there for her if the Doctor didn't show up.

"He'll come back," Rose replied with only the faintest tremble in her voice betraying the slow collapse of her surety.

Mickey sighed, exasperated. He'd be lying if he said that he hadn't hoped that something good would come out of Canary Wharf, that maybe he'd have that second chance with Rose that he'd wanted for so long, that perhaps with the Doctor out of the picture she'd turn around and see that faithful old Mickey was still there, the way she had with Jimmy Stones...

But the Doctor wasn't Jimmy Stones, and Rose wasn't the heartbroken teenager she once was. She was stronger now, strong enough to not need anyone, strong enough to bottle all her pain up inside herself and move on as well as she could.

Mickey glared at the shrubbery Rose had been watching almost exclusively for the past five and a half hours and shifted slightly to allow some blood back into his legs. They tingled painfully and he quickly shifted back, feeling the flesh deaden once more.

Rose nibbled at the inside of her cheek, glancing momentarily at the sky as if it could tell her when the Doctor was coming. Because he had to come. He had said he would.

She picked a blade of grass and started rolling it between her fingers.

Of course he'd come back. He'd come back the first time, hadn't he? And she hadn't even asked him to, he had just come.

He'd come back for her. She knew that.

She just had to convince herself.

Bored and frustrated, she crumpled the grass up and threw it violently away before leaning back, angling her arms behind her to keep her from toppling onto her back as she squinted into the sky again.

"If he doesn't come back..." tried Mickey.

"He'll come back." Even if it takes decades.

As if triggered by her words, the familiar grating roar of the TARDIS flowed out from the exact point she had known it would land as stray leaves were whisked out of the way from the wind from the ship's materialisation. She stood up, weaving slightly on legs which hadn't moved more than a few inches or supported much weight for several hours and didn't bother to hold back her grin as the frame of the ship pulsed into existence.

"Told you," she told Mickey triumphantly as the TARDIS emitted the harsh _boom _informing everyone in the vicinity that she had finally managed to get all the way into the universe, which was an impressive enough feat to warrant such a noise and everyone in the vicinity should therefore be impressed.

The door swung open with a faintly alien creak and the Doctor slipped through, leaving the entrance cracked invitingly open. He stepped forwards, only the slightest darkness in his eyes betraying his nervousness, which quickly dissipated when he saw what she had been sitting on all that time.

He grinned at her and she couldn't help but return the gesture before she handed him the backpack and slipped quickly around him to run inside the ship.

She skidded to a halt almost instantly as a ramp which hadn't been there before nearly tripped her. The room was darker now, warmer, with bronze-ish walls which seemed to almost breathe, bathed in the green light from the console. The console itself was smooth and a similar shade of bronze, apart from the area around the controls, from where the green light glowed. Tall, almost treelike supports branched from floor to ceiling, one limb of each meeting at the top of the central, glowing column and the other going the other way to merge into the roof. There was grating on the floor instead of the cold whiteness of the previous one and a battered chair beside the worn console, which gave a welcoming hum as she instinctively reached out to the railing which hadn't been there before.

She spun around to the Doctor, who had followed her and was standing in front of the closed door with a vaguely amused smirk touching his features.

"You've redecorated," she managed to say.

His smile grew. "Like it?"

She grinned back. "I love it."

He went around her to send them whirling into the Vortex, while outside, Jackie ran outside in time to see the blue box give one final pulse of energy before it vanished from sight with its trademark grating whine.

Mickey glowered momentarily at the empty space it had left before slowly turning to leave.

-BAD WOLF-

_And so the last of my plan was destroyed._

_I can't blame them. I've said it before, I can't blame them. Rose doesn't know that she can still get back to her own universe and the Doctor is too selfish to inform her of this._

_I just can't help but wish that things could have been more simple. There's no painless way out of here now._

_I just hope that it ends before they've gone too far for the Doctor to let her go without further pain. Or for Rose to leave without breaking her heart again._

_Because we all know that she must._

-BAD WOLF-

Right, there's episode 1 over and done with— sorry it's a bit shorter. Is it a bit shorter? I can't tell any more. Gah.— but do not fear, lovely and wonderful people who read my stuff and hopefully review it (poke poke, and shame on you to those who don't. -shames-). I've actually got half of a plot-line for the next one, I just have to flesh it out a bit.

Oh, and if you haven't seen it yet, read Donna's new character sheet on the Doctor Who website. We have Hope yet! -random cheer-

PS: I got a request from some random person. The request was for smut. My answer: Ah... no. Look, go and read the first chapter of _Dear My Love_— that's the closest I get to smuttiness. Sorry.


	6. The StarEater, part I

Hello! Did you miss me? No? Thought not.

**Disclaimer: **You think a daydreaming, fangirlish, teenaged amateur author like myself would dare even contemplate owning what Our Lords and Masters, the Mighty BBC have brought back from the dead? What drugs are you on?

-BAD WOLF-

_Ah, back again, I see. Glad to know that my endless chatter is interesting to someone._

_And yes, the Black Guardian was rude to me again, but that's okay because I've just imprisoned him within earshot of myself for all eternity._

_Either that, or he keeps quiet and listens to the story._

-BAD WOLF-

"Kivineeria?"

The Doctor made an exasperated sound. "Qvnaerie," he corrected.

"Whatever it is," Rose interrupted. "What is it? Apart from impossible to pronounce?"

"Oh, brilliant," said the Doctor happily, racing around the console like the fate of the universe didn't rest on his slender shoulders. "One of the first human colonies. Back when the galaxy was mostly safe and the really nasty things in it didn't see you as a threat and everything was just zipping about and warp drives and red alerts and stuff, they were colonising everything in sight. Most of them didn't work out because the people trying to figure out what was safe and what wasn't didn't know what they were doing, but Qvnaerie was lucky. They made it. Took thousands of years before they got bored or whatever and everybody left at once."

"Why?"

"Overcrowding, pollution, same things which made you lot leave Earth in the first place. No problem."

-BAD WOLF-

"Vynn, get in the escape pod."

The man in question shook his head belligerently, pulling his arm away from the grip of his sister.

"You're going to _die!_" she insisted. "And they're running out of room already! If we don't go now, we both get left behind!"

"And if we go, what do we do then, Illa?"

"We don't die."

"Qvnaerie is our home, it's all we've got!"

"All we've got is our lives, now _come on!_" Vynn's sister tried once more to pull him to the last spaceship by force alone, but he was stronger than she was and remained firm.

"I'm staying behind. Let someone else have my space in there." And Vynn stalked away.

No stupid heliovore was going to make _him _run. Qvnaerie was everything he had, everything he was, everything he knew; he'd never survive out there in the rest of the universe. Illa would. Illa was strong, Illa was brave, Illa could do anything, adapt to any environment. And he... He was the useless one. He was the one who couldn't do anything or even think of anything which didn't have something to do with his beloved planet. He couldn't help it if Qvnaerie, her quirks and history and greenish water and purplish grass, was all he could comprehend. Spaceships and the rest of the universe were intimidating, terrifying, even.

And don't even start on aliens. He didn't much fancy getting chatted up by a bug-eyed monster, thank you very much.

Footsteps, slightly laboured breathing, and Illa came into view.

"I'm not leaving without you," she said in explanation.

"I'm not going."

"Then I'm staying."

As the red-tinted sky dimmed to purple and the last spaceship flew away, leaving several villages' worth of people behind, Vynn turned his crystalline grey eyes to the new light in the heavens, the massive body of the heliovore glowing faintly in the dying sunset.

They were all going to die, thought Vynn suddenly. They were all going to die. _He _was going to die, and he had dragged his sister down with him.

-BAD WOLF-

And that's where the theme song would go if this really happened.


	7. The StarEater, part II

Gvv...nnrr...kvn...er?

I never knew I was so loved!

Kate stumbled upon a Livejournal entry praising this fic... and... I... am... astounded...

**Disclaimer: **If ravenous hunger and overcaffeination equalled ownership of Doctor Who, I'd own it. As it is, ravenous hunger and overcaffeination merely mean that I need to eat and stop drinking tea at night. -guilty look-

**WARNING: **Version 1 of this chapter was beta'd. Version 2 was not. This is version 2.

SIAPNIAN: Updates will probably be even slower than they usually are, as school has gotten even more hectic since I've fallen a bit behind (and yes, it is partially because I write so much fanfic) and what free time I have is more often spent writing original fiction than fanfiction. Thus, what with inventing my own characters and adhering to their traits, I have gotten a little rusty on the lovely Rose's personality. The Doctor is fine, as series 4 is happening and I get to happily squee at him, but Rose hasn't actually spoken yet and I'm too excited about my original fiction to watch episodes where she makes speaking appearances for a great deal of the episode. HOWEVER, I will attempt to do something at least once every two weeks, hopefully once a week but you never know, just to let you know that I'm still alive. So yeah. Oh, and for those two of you who might possibly be interested in my original fiction, I am SilentSorrowInEmptyBoats on Fictionpress and will hopefully start uploading something soon. Two somethings, in fact.

Anyway, I'll shut up now and get on with it.

Enjoy, if at all possible.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor grinned as Rose flashed a small smile in his direction and opened the door a crack before slipping out of the TARDIS.

He joined her, pulling his coat on and closing the door, the blatant enthusiasm on her face infectious. He hadn't seen someone so excited to see something in...

He'd never seen someone so excited to see something.

If this was what she looked like when he took her to a new planet, came the unexpected and somewhat unwelcome thought, what would she look like if she saw her original Doctor again?

He squashed that thought. Knowing him, he probably would rather think that it was impossible to get her back; Other Him would think that she was too precious for him to endanger with his presence. Therefore, This Him could keep her, and that would be perfectly all right. Because he certainly didn't consider her too precious to take with him. Nope. His reasons for keeping her were entirely unselfish. She wanted to see the universe, therefore he took her. And that had nothing whatsoever to do with his inexplicable want to be around her, because of course there _was _no inexplicable want to be around her.

Of course not.

Satisfied with his logic, he got back to watching her reaction.

She brushed her hair behind her ears as she looked downwards at the purple-toned grass, smiling so widely the Doctor almost wondered if her face would split and remove itself from her skull. Which would be a pity, of course— and most decidedly not because of the fact that it was a very nice face. Well, a bit. But, more importantly, she needed it.

She glanced upwards to the oddly-tinted sky with its yellow sun dangling just in sight, turning the landscape golden-red with its slowly dying rays, then without warning she started to jump up and down to feel the springiness of the earth and the grass.

"I've missed this," she cried as she continued her wild vertical motion before spinning around without warning to hug him.

He smiled and automatically returned the unexpected and not unwelcome embrace, infected with her joy. Qvnaerie wasn't the most beautiful or exciting of planets and the area they were standing in appeared to be a slightly damp field, yet she was completely enthused. He'd had companions who would be irritated because the grass was a bit wet.

They never lasted very long.

"Where are all the people, though?" she asked, glancing around, breathless after her gyrations.

"Good question." Could be that they don't like standing around in slightly damp fields, he considered.

Or it could be because the one village (habitation area, city, hamlet, conglomeration) he could see wasn't in the slightly damp field at all and they were quite sensibly remaining in there.

"Let's try over there," he told her before he set off in exactly that direction.

Rose couldn't contain another slight jump before she followed him. The air smelled different, the grass was slightly purplish, the sky had a reddish tint to it which wasn't entirely the fault of the sunset, and she was _off-world. _She felt like an addict who had gone into severe withdrawal finding another fix. Only better. Much, much better.

The ground was springy. She nearly twisted her ankle a couple of times, but the _ground _was _springy. _Earth wasn't springy. It just kind of squished when you stepped on it. Qvnaerie— she mouthed the syllables and almost got it right— was springy. And smelled good.

She wondered why anyone would want to leave, especially if they'd lived there all their lives.

She wondered why the village looked so empty as they approached it.

She wondered why there were scorch marks on the field beyond the village, surrounding things which distinctly looked like rocket-launchers.

"Got the flight wrong again?" she inquired, a teasing note creeping into her voice, almost disguising a tinge of nervousness. Something nagged at her, an extra sense telling her that something was very distinctly Not Right about this. She just couldn't quite piece it together.

"It's weird," said the Doctor, unconsciously echoing her thoughts. "I told the TARDIS to take us here a few generations after colonisation, and it _looks _right, but nobody's here."

"And someone's run off with the rockets, haven't they?"

"Exactly."

There was a slightly absent quality about his voice which Rose instantly recognised.

"Trouble," she said, half-question, half-statement.

"Well," he said, pretending to consider it, "no harm in finding out. Come on."

He sped up, miraculously keeping his footing on the damp grass, and Rose found it difficult to keep up with him. She slid a little ungracefully as the ground sloped unexpectedly, but the Doctor was facing the other direction so he couldn't see her. After a moment in which she nearly fell, she managed to regain her footing and continued attempting to follow him.

The village looked abandoned, and hastily so. The houses— odd conglomerates of plastic, metal, unidentifiable bits and pieces which looked like they had been scavenged from a spaceship, and local wood— were completely dark and the hamlet was eerily silent. Rose shivered involuntarily, partially from that unnameable nervousness, partially because the sun was almost completely down and it was starting to get rather cold.

"Is everyone gone, or are they just hiding, do you think?"

"Hiding." The Doctor turned abruptly to her. "Colonies around their second or third generation, when there doesn't appear to be any chance of failure, will cannibalise their shuttles. Thus the extra bits stuck on the houses. They wouldn't have had the same number of spaceships as they did when they arrived, there wouldn't be enough fuel left to power all of them, and the population would have been too large to fit all of them on the spaceships even if they still had them and they could fly back to wherever. No, there's someone here."

Something whirred ominously behind Rose.

"And... here they come," said the Doctor, the faintest note of anxiety destroying his attempt at flippancy.

Rose turned around and was not at all surprised to see someone pointing a gun at them. The Time Lord reached for her forearm and slowly drew her behind him before raising his hands very, very slowly. Rose mimicked his gesture with one hand, the other fingering the cold metal in her pocket as she calmly pretended to surrender.

"Why is no-one ever happy to see us?" muttered the Doctor under his breath. "We can be saving their entire planet, but no, they've got to go and threaten our lives. Of course."

Okay, thought Rose. She's had a grand total of one adventure with him, only just agreed to travel with him, and he's saying that no-one's ever happy to see _them. _It was unexpected and a little odd, and she wasn't entirely sure what to think about it, so she didn't.

"Who are you?" asked the girl with the gun. She was maybe sixteen, perhaps a little older, with straight black hair. Then again, it might have been brown. Rose couldn't really tell in the light, or lack thereof. She held the weapon as if she wasn't quite sure what it was, much less what to do with it, which simultaneously reassured and distressed Rose.

"I'm the Doctor and this is Rose," said the Doctor. "Might I ask why you're wanting to kill us?"

"No, I don't know either of you," said the girl, stepping forwards a little bit. "Where'd you come from?"

"We've got a ship. Just... wandering, you know. Passed by Qvnaerie, thought why not?" The Doctor paused, eyes flickering to the weapon. "Would you really mind... dropping that?"

She tensed for a moment.

"We can help," offered Rose. "With... whatever."

The girl paused before letting her arm drop to her side. "Not like it matters anyway," she muttered, tossing it randomly aside. It collided with a rock, sparked violently (making the Doctor and Rose instinctively flinch), and stopped its rhythmic, malevolent humming. "That zarking creature's gonna kill us all. Everyone left behind."

"What creature?" asked Rose, relaxing and removing her hand from her pocket. She had never liked that thing, never liked using it, especially didn't like using it on frightened teenagers.

The frightened teenager in question looked up. "How can you get on this planet and not know?"

"We only just arrived," said the Doctor, putting his hands in his pockets.

"Then you'd have to see it when you came down—"

"It just sort of appears. Now _what is going on?_" interrupted the impatient Doctor snappishly.

The girl blinked and shied away a little bit as if his very voice was dangerous. "It's a heliovore," she said, not even trying to conceal the hopelessness and fear in her words.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows and glanced upwards. "Ah," he said. "There."

Rose glanced up and saw nothing but stars and an ominous-looking, luminous cloud near the sun, so she naturally assumed it was the cloud.

"Funny thing, heliovores. Never met one of those I liked. Well, I've never met one. It's... sort of pretty, though. Isn't it?"

"S'pose," said Rose, squinting at it.

"Nice. Anyway." He glanced down at her. "Eats suns, like the name suggests," he explained.

"Wouldn't that burn it to death?" she objected.

"Nah, it's a gas cloud. Like a living nebula, only it eats stars instead of making them. Surrounds them and absorbs all the star's energy, then goes on floating through space."

"So that thing's gonna eat the sun."

"Unless we stop it."

"You can't stop a heliovore, now you're just being completely ridiculous," scoffed the girl.

"What was your name?" asked the Doctor, wandering over to her.

She looked warily up at him. "Illa."

"Well then, Illa," he said, enunciating each syllable excruciatingly clearly, "maybe we can stop it and maybe we can't. And if we can't, we shove all of you in my spaceship and take you somewhere else. All right?"

"One spaceship can't hold—"

"Bigger on the inside," he interrupted.

She gaped at him. "That's impossible," she insisted.

"Course it is! That's why I like it!" he said, grinning. "Now," he said, abruptly slipping into a mood of considerably more gravity, "can you tell me anything that might help?"

"Like what?" asked Illa.

"Oh, I dunno. Anything you know, really. Planet, heliovore, kronkburger prices on Castor 36..."

"Maybe not the last one," said Rose as Illa bit her lip.

She hesitated. "I don't know a lot about any of it," she said. "I always liked just reading and stuff... But my brother would know," she added. "Know more than me, anyway."

"Where is he, then?" the Doctor inquired.

Illa paused, then turned. "This way," she said, and started walking.

-BAD WOLF-

_Ah, yes. Pity, really, that Rose had to pick up that thing in the first place, much less use it, but what else could she do? A twenty-one-year-old who gets in as much trouble as she does has to be able to defend herself somehow. She doesn't exactly look threatening, after all._

_She got the blaster from the body of a strangely fanatical creature. It and its thousand-or-so friends had been hired by their artist, who had for some reason wanted to paint a rather lovely depiction of the deaths of six entire sentient species to protest the casual genocide several other sentient species enjoyed practising. Naturally, the paintings needed the six species in question to be dead first, and unfortunately humans were one of the artist's targets. Rose had tried talking to them and got herself captured for her efforts. Torchwood had tried shooting at them with rather more success, and as soon as Rose managed to escape her cage she stole the first weapon she found and started using it with a skill which surprised her colleagues. Well, to be honest, it was surprising to them until she admitted that she did like playing this universe's virtual-reality version of Halo, even though she always wondered if she was accidentally furthering an alien plot. After the battle with the rather hypocritical aliens was over she just kept the thing in case another group of art-fanatics decided to not listen to her frankly brilliant logic and carry on with their massacre._

_And yes, I did have something to do with that._

_No, her decision to keep the weapon, not the art fanatics themselves. Stupid mortals. As if I'd nearly get her killed and painted just to keep her from getting killed in the future._

_All right, all right, so I nearly killed her when I used her as my host, but that is most definitely not the point no matter what the White Guardian or anyone else might say._

-BAD WOLF-

The problem with Qvnaerie, thought the Doctor, was that it was picturesque. It looked absolutely beautiful, with the unnaturally large, reddish moon hanging in the starry sky and the massive trees and the springy grass. It was good for painting. It was _not _good for walking on in the middle of the night, especially if one's companion was human.

The human in question was limping a little bit from an unfortunate incident involving some grass which unhelpfully disguised a distinct and violent unevenness of the springy earth. Thankfully, she had begun her descent in just the right direction to collide with the Doctor, and thus she never actually managed to hit the ground and was also able to preserve some semblance of her dignity. They had been walking for roughly five minutes and fifty-eight seconds, but it felt longer even to the Doctor and the Time Lord knew that Rose would miscalculate even more. In addition to that it was getting cold and Rose didn't have his resistance to changes in temperature, although knowing her even as little as he did, he naturally assumed she wouldn't mention it.

"How much longer, do you think?" came her voice from the darkness.

He would never admit it, but he jumped a little bit at the unexpected interruption to his thoughts.

"No way of telling," he said. "But I don't think it should be too long."

"Good," she said.

"You all right?" he inquired, glancing over at her.

"Fine," she said. "Just a bit bored. I mean, not exactly exciting, is it, a heliovore? Not like a Slitheen or whatever, it doesn't chase you or anything, just sort of... dangles at you."

He smiled a bit. "Oh, never assume that there won't be any running, Rose," he reassured her.

She looked sceptical, but didn't pursue it.

Without warning Illa darted ahead until she was almost out of sight. "Vynn!" she shouted. "I'm back!" And with that she sat down and pushed herself off the edge, skidding out of sight. A faint rustling sound reached the Time Lord and his companion and the top of Illa's head came into view.

The Doctor went up the leaf-strewn slope first, then helped Rose next to him before stepping off the ledge, dropping down the steep embankment and landing easily, with all the nonchalance he carefully maintained. Rose stuck her tongue out at him momentarily for showing off (not that he could see it, anyway) and, not wanting to risk hurting herself again, she sat down on the edge and pushed herself off from there, landing a little awkwardly next to the Time Lord.

There was another village before them, larger than the last and with considerably more people. The air of hopelessness pervaded the place almost tangibly as the humans wandered about, presumably preparing for sleep. Illa and a man roughly her age were standing a few feet away in a shady area which seemed, by some sort of unmarked and unquestioned sensation, to be just beyond the border of the village.

"Vynn," said Illa, "this is the Doctor and she's Rose. They said they might be able to help."

Vynn gave the Doctor and Rose a sceptical look. "Help against a heliovore?" he inquired, scorn prevalent in his tone.

"I'm very good," said the Doctor by way of explanation. "Just today Rose and I defeated a ship full of Racnoss."

_Today? _Rose gave him an amused look. Other him had asked her twice, this him hadn't been able to wait a few hours...

"Never heard of them?" he inquired, sounding more than a little disappointed at their silence.

"Who are you, and what are you doing here?" asked Vynn with unexpected coldness.

"Vynn!" said Illa sharply.

"They could be anyone, or anything!" snapped Vynn back at her. "For all we know, they're aliens."

The Doctor opened his mouth and Rose, foreseeing an incredibly asinine comment preparing to be spoken, elbowed him sharply to make him shut up before he managed to say it.

"What's wrong with that?" asked Illa exasperatedly. "If you hadn't been so stubborn, we'd be dealing with aliens anyway. And it's not like they look alien. Stop being so xenophobic."

"I'm not being xenophobic, I'm being cautious!"

"Look," said Rose, very calmly, "we're safe. I'm human, at least. He's... not, but at least I am, and that's got to count for something, yeah?"

Vynn gave her a witheringly suspicious look.

The Doctor, who had been glaring at the leaves above them and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, suddenly decided to stop trying to be quiet. "Look, either we're nasty evil things who kill you before the heliovore gets you, we're nasty evil things who are going to watch as the heliovore gets you, we're good people and we try to help and fail and the heliovore gets you, or we're good people and we try to help and we actually manage it. The situation doesn't seem that bad to me, but what do I know? I mean, I could tell you—"

Rose shut him up before he started listing ways in which he was more intelligent than Vynn or anyone else.

"Vynn, please," pleaded Illa.

"You know more about this place than any of us," said the Doctor. "You could help us. And keep an eye on us if you insist on it, but more importantly you can help."

Silence.

"I don't like it," muttered the human.

"But you'll help?" pursued Rose.

Another pause.

"Yes."

"Good," said the Doctor, relaxing considerably. If a frightened teenaged girl was allowed to carry a 37∂6679.5CRBSK like the one she had so rudely pointed at them, there was no telling who else they gave weapons to on this planet. "Let's get started, then." He leaned back on the slightly moist embankment. "What can you tell me," he said conversationally, "about the heliovore?"

-BAD WOLF-

All right, squeeing time now.

JANE AUSTEN IS COOLNESS INCARNATE!! AAAHH!! -runs around screaming- I LOVE HER! SHE ROCKS! SHE IS PWNAGE! _PWNAGE I TELL YOU!!_

And Agatha Christie is beginning to look intriguing as well. :P

And now shameless publicity time. KateCarter has got a forum up for all things new series. It has a fanfiction section which is... Well, it's not exactly beta-ing, more like testing the waters before actually uploading. 'Tis a thing of coolness. :) And about two thirds of the members don't post. I mean, really, what's the point of joining if you aren't going to post? -irked- I am, obviously, a part of the 1/3 that _does _talk. As you would know, the problem with me lies very firmly in the area of getting me to shut up. As I am now demonstrating. Sorry. Anyway, it's newwhovian (dot) proboards89 (dot) com, if anyone's interested.

PS: Oi, TCASM, is this good enough? :P

Oh, and I've calculated how many chapters this is going to take. At my current rate, the last chapter will be number 65. -whimper- This is going to take a while... If anyone wants to freak out at the probable length of the story and jump ship, do so NOW before I actually start having fun with this.

All right, people, you know the drill. The more reviews I get, the more inspired I am to write the next chapter more quickly. And that means you, people-who-read-the-story,-favourite-it-and/or-put-it-on-alert,-but-don't-bother-reviewing! -pointed glare in your direction-

All right, I'll shut up for real now. Be seeing you. :)


	8. The StarEater, part III

I was poked into admitting that it was time I started working on this again, despite the fact that HARDLY ANYONE REVIEWS IT ANYMORE. -pointed glare at everybody but Hardly Anyone-

**Disclaimer: **I own one of the many alternate Doctors there are on this site... but... yeah, that's pretty much it.

SIAPNIAN: Remember the sudden bursts of inspiration that were caused earlier from Mum painting the room in which Tricia (the computer) resided? Well, she's doing it again. With my room. So expect to be spammed as the paint fumes react with my creative circuits.

**Extra Thingie: **There is a strong allusion to my pointless!plotless!angstless!fluff!fic, _Distraction, _in here. Yes, that was Shameless Self-Promotion. Thank you for noticing! :)

**Non-Warning: **Infinite thanks go to Aelita Madeline and TCASM, the lovely and talented people who keep me from writing absolute Staazula, and ThroughAnAmberFocus over at Teaspoon for managing to poke me into working on this again.

**Random complaining: **And now won't let me use hyphens in PMs... -twitch-

-BAD WOLF-

Vynn glanced away for a moment.

"All that I know is that it appeared about six months ago, was identified a week or so after that, and that it's going to kill us all."

"Oh, he's optimistic, isn't he?" muttered Rose.

The Doctor's lips twitched for a moment before he turned and glanced between the trees, to where the glowing form of the heliovore was barely visible just above the horizon.

"So," he said, with that flippant voice which told Rose that there was something very wrong indeed, "we've got about... ooh..." He frowned at the creature for a few moments, calculating.

She shifted.

"Twelve hours," he said. "Give or take."

She nodded wisely at this. "Twelve hours to convince a massive, living nebula thing—"

"With the intelligence of a very large puddle," supplied the Doctor helpfully, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.

"—to kindly not eat a star which we and a lot of other people are currently orbiting around," she finished.

"Are you doubting my abilities, Rose Tyler?" he asked, doing a surprisingly good imitation of a kicked puppy.

"'Course not."

"Good."

Vynn and Illa had been regarding them with an odd combination of hope, despair, and outright bafflement, and this did not go away when the Doctor turned to talk to them again.

"Could you tell me what year it is?"

Illa gave him an odd look. "How could you not know?"

The Doctor opened his mouth.

"His ship, she's a time machine," interrupted Rose before he started rambling in a complicated mix of technobabble, alien slang and overusage of the word "thingie" that even he probably couldn't understand.

He glared at her, but she didn't much care.

The girl's eyes widened. "You..."

"Yes, yes, we wander through time and space in a blue box that's bigger on the inside, now could you get on with it and tell me when we've ended up?" the Doctor cut in sharply, irked at Rose.

Illa shifted her weight to her other foot. "2.8/Yam/12," she said, a distinct note of uncertainty in her voice.

The Doctor winced. "Not... exactly the best time to be for heliovore-defeating, technology-wise," he said. "Meh," he eventually continued. "Adds a bit of challenge to it, I suppose."

"Can't be easy every time," agreed Rose, who had decided to just go along with the Doctor's rapidly changing moods.

"Quite right." He straightened up and walked away.

"Is he always like that?" inquired Illa as he vanished into the village... hamlet... thing.

"You get used to it," said Rose reassuringly as she ordered her protesting legs to obey her and limped after him.

"Let me guess," she said quietly as she disguised the slight pain still running up her calf, "there's something going on with someone's timelines that doesn't let you do anything for this planet at all."

He glanced down, frowning. "Not as such."

"So what's wrong, then?"

"What makes you think something's wrong?" he shot back, confirming the niggling suspicion that there was something wrong.

"Rose Tyler superpowers."

He raised an eyebrow at her. So she did have an inherent telepathic control matrix aimed at him, then?

"You're doing that thing where you're acting like everything is right with the universe," she clarified.

"I always do that," he half-lied, scanning the mostly empty houses for things he could scavenge.

"Well, yeah, but this is a different sort."

He turned his attention back to her.

"You study my moods?"

"I've got a list back home," she answered, grinning, the tip of her tongue poking out from between her lips and that particular habit of hers most certainly did not interest him at all.

A wicked light was gleaming in her Time-flecked, honey-coloured eyes and there was a distinctly teasing nuance in her absolutely-not-fascinating-to-the-Doctor-at-all smile.

"Really?" he asked, giving her a look that was clearly labelled Absolutely Not Fooled and trying to keep an oddly hopeful note out of his voice. Why was there an oddly hopeful note in his voice, anyway?

"I've got it back in the TARDIS, yeah," she said, drawing her fingernail across the side of her nose and tucking a strand of golden hair behind her ear (and he did not want to do it for her; be reasonable, Time Lords didn't do that sort of thing). "I can show you when we get back."

The corner of his mouth twitched.

She was silent for a moment, then gaped at him. "Were you trying to change the subject back there?" she asked, voice a little shrill with the sudden realisation that she had fallen for it.

He made an odd humming noise that Rose had never heard from anyone but him. "Maybe."

"Right," she said. "How long until the universe suddenly implodes in a big ball of fire?"

He rolled his eyes in vague disgust. "You people always assume that the end of the universe is—"

"Doctor."

"It's nowhere near that bad. Just..." He screwed his face up a little trying to think of a way to explain. "Weird. Like a niggling... itch. I've had it for a while, but it's getting stronger."

"Is it bad?"

"Could be. Could be nothing at all. No way of telling."

-BAD WOLF-

_It was definitely something. The Doctor's piloting skills may not exactly be the best in the entire multiverse, but his temporal instincts are almost as good as those of his ship._

_Something had happened in the timestream that was never meant to happen, and its very happening disguised the fact that it wasn't supposed to have happened in the first place. If the thing happening had just been left alone, things might have been all right, but the Doctor had to go and mess with it because he's the Doctor and that's what he does._

_All right, so he didn't know he was messing with it at the time— the thing didn't know, either— but the point still stands._

_The thing happened more insistently than it would have had he left the thing alone, and almost every timeline abruptly changed. Oh, one or two timelines are fine as long as they're minor; hell, all the timelines can be altered if you're A. me and B. careful. But, needless to say, the Doctor was not me, or careful, and now the entirety of spacetime is beginning to fracture under the sudden and unexpected stress._

_To put it simply, in terms that you mortals will understand perfectly, the Doctor has just cocked things up again and Very Bad Things Indeed are going to happen at some point in the near future._

_Now I'm going to have to leave you for a second; Q has started insulting the Ori again and I should probably stop them before they get in another fight and the galaxy implodes. Keep an eye on the Doctor and Rose for me until I come back, okay?_

_Oh, what am I on about? You can't help them if they get into trouble again. Never mind. I'll just try to come back before they decide to blow something up and end up dead._

-BAD WOLF-

"So what's the brilliant plan?" asked Rose. The Doctor had abruptly sat down on an unusually large fallen branch in front of a particularly ramshackle mix of unidentifiable bits of metal, wood, and something that looked like plastic, and was now staring at it.

"Heliovores," he said, "are not completely undefeatable. I think." He frowned at the sky.

Rose rolled her eyes.

"Their one weakness, really, is that they're stupid."

"Very large puddle," she recalled.

"Exactly. Now, under normal circumstances that wouldn't help us much because it's hard to persuade something like that not to do something— have you ever tried to persuade a puddle?" He turned to her, eyes wide and innocent, framed with thick lashes that surely would have looked absurd on anyone else, and for a moment her breath caught in her throat.

She shook herself.

"Can't say I have, no," she said, plopping down on the stick next to him. It shifted at the added strain, but held. "Although there was that one weird thing on Praxmillia VI."

"Doesn't count."

"No."

There was silence for a moment.

"Anyway, what were you talking about?"

He shook himself abruptly. "Right. Under normal circumstances, the intelligence of a patch of water wouldn't be very helpful, but right now it might, because since it's so stupid it won't know the difference between a real star and something that feels like a star, but isn't."

"So... you're gonna make it think that it's heading the wrong way?" she asked, brow furrowing a little.

"I'm going to cloak the real star and move the signal in a different direction," he clarified. "The thing's too stupid to know that stars don't move, it'll go towards the fake one. Hopefully."

"So what are we waiting for?" she prodded.

"Something to look useful." He glared at the plastic lining one of the crude windows as if he could melt it with his gaze.

She wouldn't be surprised if it really happened.

"Meaning?" she prompted.

"Meaning I need to construct a transmitter strong enough to trick the thing, and then build a very large and complex cloaking device, and I don't have any duct tape with me."

She snorted a little, swinging her legs. The branch rocked with the movement, swaying them rhythmically. "Always thought that's what you used to fix the TARDIS."

"Staazula, you've found me out," he said, a mocking lilt to his tone. The slight upward curve of his lips betrayed his amusement. Silhouetted against the dark sky, he had rarely looked more alien or more beautiful, and Rose's eyes flickered across his outline, unbidden.

He turned his head and she felt her skin prickle sharply at the vague affection glowing in them. Amiability. Not love. Not her Doctor. Never had been, never would be.

She turned away, the loss stinging anew.

"D'you think you can manage without the tape, or do we have to go back to the TARDIS to get it?" she inquired, forcing her thoughts from the melancholy turn they'd taken. An entire planet (and everyone on it) was in serious danger and it most definitely wasn't a good time for mourning what would never come back again.

"Well, I'm a genius," he said, still lilting. He'd seen her expression just before she looked away and it nearly broke him. He hadn't even known her for twenty-four hours, but he knew that the level of pain she bore should never have been placed upon her.

She chuckled. "So you tell me," she teased. Before he could retort, she'd jumped off of the branch. It bobbed wildly and the Doctor was forced to leap to his feet immediately afterwards to avoid being flung off into the earth. As springy as it might have been, he had never liked the taste of the particular sort of dirt that Earth creatures used.

"So go on," she prompted. "What do you need?"

"Vynn and Illa, for one," he replied, sticking his hands in his pockets and walking back up the hill.

-BAD WOLF-

_Ah, good. They're still alive. It might have only been a minute, but it only takes a second for the Doctor to discover a new and interesting way of killing himself and everyone around him..._

_As I'm sure you already know. Really, it gets on my nerves, the scrapes I have to get him out of half of the time..._

_Anyway._

-BAD WOLF-

The house collapsed in a cloud of dust and the Doctor jumped away, grinning with delight at this new act of destruction and pocketing the sonic screwdriver, which had caused most of the damage to the building. Vynn, sadly lacking the Time Lord's superior reflexes, started coughing loudly as he backed away from the crumpled wreckage.

Rose, perched on the branch she had vacated an hour or two before, narrowed her eyes as the cloud came her way and Illa sneezed violently from her seat next to her. Fifteen minutes into the Doctor's attempts at resonating the structure and Vynn's attempts to pull it down by brute force, the helpful teenager had gone to find some lights. They weren't much, but they illuminated the smallish corner of the mostly-deserted village the Time Lord and his companion had claimed and thus eliminated the possibility of the humans tripping or otherwise injuring themselves in the darkness.

Not for the first time, Rose silently cursed the Doctor for his alien ability to find his way around in the dark. Perfectly.

He crouched in the rubble, picking it apart, grinning quietly to himself at each new unidentifiable object he found. He tossed a bulky object at Vynn, who instinctively caught it and looked down at it blankly.

"It's an empty box," he said.

"Yep," confirmed the Doctor, turning something shiny over in his hands, peering at it through his glasses.

"You're going to save the planet with...?"

"Yep," the Time Lord repeated, getting up without warning and taking the box back, darting over to a clear area near where Rose resided and sitting cross-legged on the earth, holding his sonic screwdriver in his mouth to leave his hands free. Aforementioned box nestled in his lap, he took a thin filament that looked like one of those fibre optic toys that used to so utterly fascinate Rose and poked what might have been a circuit board with it.

"Rose," he said, voice more than a little muffled by the screwdriver, "could you get me the—"

What followed was so garbled that the Doctor himself probably couldn't have understood it.

"The what?"

He repeated it.

She took the screwdriver away from his mouth, gingerly holding it by one end. She didn't think she'd much enjoy getting Doctor drool all over her hand, thank you very much.

"The—" he tried again.

"Just point at it," she interrupted him.

He gave her a condescending look. "My hands are currently otherwise occupied," he said, as if he was trying to explain something very simple to a particularly stupid child.

She glanced down at the array of things before her, picked one, and handed it to him.

She dozed off shortly thereafter, lulled into slumber by sheer boredom, and therefore wasn't sure how much time had passed when a particularly rude Gallifreyan curse ripped through the air and made her jerk awake, terrified that something was about to blow up.

"What is it? What's wrong?" she stuttered, adrenaline forcing any last vestiges of tiredness out of her system.

"I haven't got an energy converter," he said, glaring at the box (which now held a complicated array of junk) as if it was all its fault. "At least not one small enough to fit in here.

Rose swallowed, slipping her fingers into the pocket of her jacket, pulse unexpectedly jumping. She'd wondered, she'd always wondered what the Doctor would do if he found out about that particular device; now, she supposed, it was time she found the answer.

"Like this?" she inquired, almost shyly, bringing the metallic object out of her pocket and offering it.

His eyes flickered down to it and she felt his mood abruptly change from frantic tension to angst— a subtle change for most, but she could feel the alteration shuddering through every nerve. It frightened her.

"You carry a gun?" he asked, voice tight and low and almost, almost a growl. His eyes were crystalline and harsh, glittering coldly in the dim light as if gemstones had replaced the dark amber pools.

"I had to defend myself somehow," she said, a little snappishly, anger rising in her gut. He didn't know her, didn't know what she had been through day after day. How dare he judge her?

"That doesn't justify it," he snapped, eyes blazing. "There are a thousand other ways to—"

"And none of them worked!" she shouted, all pretence of patience spent, and he silenced. Anger and a vague emotion like betrayal emanated almost palpably from him, but he didn't speak.

Assured that he wouldn't interrupt her again, her voice dropped.

"When I was with you, yeah, it was all right. I could run all I liked, you'd be right behind me doing something clever." She inhaled shakily, pain washing over her anew. "And when I joined Torchwood, I just assumed... I assumed that it'd be the same. And then I nearly got killed."

"Nearly," he repeated, as if that justified everything.

Something inside her snapped, crimson light blazing across her consciousness, and she suddenly just wanted to hurt him.

"I was captured, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, left for dead, again and again and again, and I was sick of it!" Her voice echoed across the little hollow they resided in and surely Vynn and Illa could hear from wherever they'd gone off to, but she didn't care. "So yeah, I picked up the gun, and yes, I've killed with it, but I'm still here and it might just save the planet."

"That doesn't make it—"

"You don't know what it's been like, do you?" she interrupted. "Everything was all right when I was with you and then suddenly I was trapped here, on the other side of the Void from my entire life, and there was nobody left who could save me whenever I got into trouble. I had to rescue myself no matter what it took. And I didn't like it, didn't want it, tried so hard to get by without a weapon, but I didn't have a bloody choice in the matter and you _know _that."

He glowered at her.

Her voice lowered again to a malevolent hum as she forcefully ground out her next words.

"And what I can do with this thing is _nothing _compared to what you've already done without one."

-BAD WOLF-

Sorry, couldn't resist Rose putting her foot in her mouth there. Actually, come to think of it, I probably could have quite easily, I just really, REALLY didn't want to do it.

I am going to take this opportunity to remind you that this thing is on... gah, thirty-odd alerts and I've forgotten how many favourite lists, and I'm getting three reviews per chapter. On this site, that is. The people from Teaspoon, Those Who Never Review If They Can Help It, are _out-reviewing _you. I think I've proven that the speed of an update is directly proportional to the number of reviews, and last chapter's feedback was _depressing. _ThroughAnAmberFocus had to poke me quite a bit before I started working on this chapter. 'S your fault this came so late. You should be ashamed of yourselves. -shames-

Now that my midnight, contact-less rant (Seriously, I can't see the screen right now. Can't see anything clearly unless it's six inches from my face.) is over, I'm going to bed. G'night.


	9. The StarEater, part IV

That's better. -grins happily- Now if you could carry on doing that... -somewhat pleading look-

**Disclaimer: **How many times do I have to say I own nothing before it's taken as a given that I own nothing? Oh, hold on, I own a bag of jelly babies now. And my apparent inability to write properly immediately after translating something into German. Sigh...

**Non-Warning: **Betad by the mildly insane TCASM and the completely bonkers Aelita Madeline. Yes, they have been driven to their unfortunate mental states by betaing for me, poor things. I have a nagging suspicion, however, that they might feel better if jelly babies are donated.

SIAPNIAN: I got about halfway through this chapter before I realised that if I carried on at the pace at which I had been carrying, I would unfortunately be done with this particular escapade in this one chapter. My OCD will not allow me to be done with this particular escapade in this one chapter. It will only allow me to be done in TWO chapters. So if this chapter, and the next one, are a little shorter and drag a bit more, and have much longer rants on the part of our favourite hyperintelligent pan-dimensional luminous being, I'm sorry. And no, all this mindless babbling was not just for the purpose of stretching out the word count because aforementioned OCD only allows me to write chapters in one of three sizes. What makes you say that? -eyes dart around suspiciously-

**Random German Thingie that No-One Cares About:** Ich liebe Tee. Ich habe kein Tee. Ich bin traurig. Ja, ich verwendete Babelfish für die meisten von diesem, weil ich bin ein Noob. Wie wussten Sie?

-BAD WOLF-

The instant the words were out of her mouth, Rose knew she had said something incredibly wrong.

The Doctor stilled, momentary anguish flashing deep within his dark eyes before all emotion was quickly wiped away, face and eyes hardening into an expressionless mask. He wordlessly closed his fingers around the gun and turned away, shutting her out completely.

Pain. _I'm sorry, _she screamed inwardly, but was outwardly silent as she berated herself. Backstabber. Traitor. She had called herself his friend and then used his own tortured, tormented past as a weapon against him. Heartless. Despicable. Unforgivable.

No sounds left her mouth. She bit her lip, the bitterly metallic taste of blood on her tongue almost distracting her from the fact that she was the worst person in the history of everything.

Almost.

Not quite.

After quickly hitting the button of the screwdriver to loosen it, the Doctor pried one of the metal plates off of the weapon. He poked inside with his forefinger, prodding the squat cylindrical object he needed. It sparked at him a little, sending a small jolt of electricity through his hand, but he didn't react. He pushed at the bit of technology until it disconnected from its spot with a snap, then shook it out into his hand.

He threw the now-useless weapon away. It collided with a tree with a muffled crunch and fell.

Rose was silent from her perch at his side and a little behind him. Her right knee, which had been resting against his left shoulder-blade, had shifted away. The only thing that informed him that she was still there was her faint scent in the air around him and the slight temporal distortion that perpetually followed her around like a lost puppy.

Rather like the Doctor, in fact.

He swallowed quietly. He dimly recognised he was angry, but wasn't entirely sure with what. Her for bringing up the Time War? Him for his actions in it? The Daleks for instigating it? The Time Lords for not seeing the full threat before it was too late? The whole stupid situation?

All of them?

Probably.

He plugged the energy converter into the odd conglomeration of scavenged technology and it hummed as it came to life.

He didn't smile at the triumph.

The problem with having clever companions who had inherent telepathic abilities directed towards him was that they knew exactly what to say to win such an argument as he and Rose had had. She had to have some sort of mind-reading skills. How else would she know that the Time War had happened in this universe as well as in her own? How else would she know what he'd eventually done to end it?

She was getting dangerous. Oh, it was all very well and good before, but now... He wasn't hurt, of course. Not at all. But if she knew that about him, she'd know any other weakness he might have, and if she could use those against him too... He wasn't sure anymore.

Maybe he should take her back.

Every single nuance of his mind screamed denial as that particular thought crossed his mind and he quietly growled at himself.

"Is it working?" asked Illa, interrupting the Doctor's somewhat melancholy inner dialogue.

The Doctor struggled to his feet with the cumbersome, now-malevolently buzzing device.

"Should be," he replied. "Only one way to find out, really." He grinned manically at her.

Only Rose could see the emptiness behind it and she bit her lip against another wave of guilt. The other Doctor, her Doctor, might have been able to get over the remark after a while, but this version... This version she wasn't entirely sure about yet. He acted more like his ninth self than the Doctor Rose had known, and this worried her.

The Doctor turned to the third human accompanying him. "Vynn," he addressed him, "are there any hills out in open air anywhere near where we are? Say... less than an hour?"

Vynn considered.

"This way," he said, indicating, after a long moment, and set off in exactly that direction.

The Doctor followed quickly and it was not, absolutely not, because he wanted to get away from Rose.

Rose was not about to let him escape. She half-ran to catch up with him and started walking beside him, catching one of the more precarious pieces of technology he held and holding on to it.

He didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry," she said softly.

"What for?" he lied, twisting his voice into some semblance of the vague confusion his words conveyed.

"For... for what I said back there. I mean, about the Time War. I shouldn't have... I dunno. I'm sorry."

There was silence for a moment.

"Doesn't matter," he replied. "It was a long time ago."

"To a human, maybe," she shot back, sounding for all the world like she was a little irritated at him trying to avoid the subject.

She probably was.

He was silent.

"'S been what, a couple of years?" she prompted.

"Three." And seven months, two weeks, five days, eighteen hours, twenty-seven minutes and two seconds, he intoned to himself in a dull monotone. He wasn't counting, though.

"Three. And all right, so maybe you might have got over a normal war, but..." She worried her lip between her teeth.

The path narrowed and the Doctor was vaguely relieved that Rose could no longer walk beside him.

"I know what you did back there."

He did not, did _not_, flinch. Not at all. Not even an infinitesimal bit. Not even enough to make the more delicate pieces of the amalgamation in his hands jerk just slightly.

Staazula.

"It was them or the universe," he said shortly, clipped tones echoing harshly in the quiet air. "It doesn't matter now."

"But it does. And I..." She trailed off for a moment, obviously fighting to figure out what to say.

"You're sorry. It's fine. It doesn't matter," he interrupted, hoping with every single fibre of his being that she didn't detect the ever-so-slight tremble in his attempt at a calm voice.

She probably did, but she didn't speak on the subject again. He felt a surge of something like gratitude.

So perhaps he hadn't healed from the Time War as much as he'd assumed that he had, said the part of him that had screamed at him when he had considered taking Rose back. Perhaps the horrific, eternal silence in his head did still bother him. Perhaps the dark wounds stretching down to his core still hadn't mended except on the surface.

Maybe that was why she was there.

The thought pattern had a tone of gentle persuasion, and the Doctor felt himself submitting.

He didn't look at Rose, but he could tell she was hurt. He'd overreacted, he'd snapped, he'd hurt her and now he wouldn't even let her apologise for pointing out the truth.

Guilt whipped through his mind, tightening around his hearts and making him want desperately to fix everything.

He shook himself and focussed on walking.

-BAD WOLF-

_All right, so maybe that particular remark didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped..._

_What are you looking at me like that for? Of course I made her say it! Well, I suppose I didn't MAKE her say anything, but I did influence her emotions enough for her to do something, or rather say something, that she would never have said otherwise. Stop it, I was being perfectly logical. If the Doctor gets hurt enough by Rose, then he'll stop holding on to her for dear life and will drop her back off with her original Doctor, and then problem solved. When Rose is returned to the proper Doctor, the anomaly mucking everything up ends, the timelines sort themselves out, and..._

_Wait. You didn't figure it out already?_

_Of course Rose is the anomaly. What else could it be? ...All right, so it could be a thousand other things, most of them with the word "Dalek" stamped on them in big, unfriendly, and forcibly mauve letters. But no, the astronomical spanner that has been chucked in the engine of spacetime happens to be our own dearly beloved Rose._

_Still don't understand? Gah, I hate talking to mortals. You'd think that if I used words like "spanner" and "chucked" in my initial explanation, you'd get what I was talking about without too much fuss. But apparently some of you didn't, so I'm going to explain in more detail, without the words "spanner" or "chucked". Or "engine", if that helps._

_Imagine an engine. A really, really big and complicated engine. It's got all these little tubes and bits and pieces that keep it from making ugly noises and then promptly exploding in a large ball of flames and thus dramatically winking out of existence. One of the aforementioned bits, the really really big and impressive one, is the Doctor._

_I see you giggling over there! Omega's orifice, does no-one have a clean mind any more?_

_Anyway, this bit, named the Doctor— stop it— goes all the way through the engine. Mess with that, and the messiness spreads to the entire engine in a fairly rapid manner. Now, this engine has failsafes which keep it from making ugly noises before exploding dramatically in the aforementioned large ball of flames. It can repair itself, to an extent. Actually, pretty much every part of it can be repaired— except for one._

_Three guesses as to which one that is._

_Now imagine there's a second engine. This one has a spanner. The spanner's name is Rose. This spanner was very tightly entwined with the other engine's part-labelled-the-Doctor— oh, for the love of Rassilon, STOP IT!— for a very long time, before another large part, named the Daleks, ripped this poor innocent spanner-named-Rose from this not-so-innocent bit-named-the-Doctor and, through a complicated series of events which you presumably already know, chucked her and her mum, who was a nut, and her ex-boyfriend, who was one of those extra bits that you can never figure out exactly what to do with, into the first engine we discussed._

_The extra bit (who actually fit quite well into this second engine, as the second engine actually needed that bit) and the nut happily ensconced themselves into some minor parts of the engine and promptly made no trouble whatsoever, and for a time the spanner-named-Rose joined them and made only a very little trouble, only about twice a week._

_Then a computer virus, named the Racnoss, tried to kill off and eat a large chunk of the engine about five billion years before that bit of engine was scheduled to be demolished. The large-bit-named-the-Doctor went to stop them. So did the spanner-named-Rose, even though she was never a part of that engine and wasn't meant to save it, as that was the large-bit-named-the-Doctor's job. The spanner-named-Rose and the large-bit-named-the-Doctor latched on to each other as if magnetised, which they may very well have been. Thus, the spanner-named-Rose is following the accustomed path of the large-bit-named-the-Doctor, and is accordingly being drawn more and more deeply into this engine, doing considerable damage the longer she's magnetically attached to this large-bit-named-the-Doctor._

_Do you see now?_

_There, now, do you understand why I'd like to separate the Doctor and Rose as soon as possible?_

_Thank you._

_We'll continue, then._

_(You're still doing it.)_

-BAD WOLF-

They didn't speak again for the entire walk, and Rose found herself considerably irritated. So she'd been silly and emotional and had snapped at him; it wasn't as if he hadn't done the same to her.

The words "stupid ape" wandered absently through her head and she flicked them away.

If he was always this sulky, came a thought, maybe she should just leave. Go home.

She rebelled. It wasn't as if she _could _go home, anyway. It would probably kill her to leave now, by choice. And, said the more sympathetic part of her, maybe the Doctor was just having a bad day.

Wouldn't have been the first time.

Besides, she considered, this one didn't seem to have had anyone to help him after the War; he was, after all, still as vulnerable as her first Doctor had been, early on in their travels.

Didn't mean he got to completely shut her out every time she said something stupid, though, muttered the part of her brain that was not attached to any sympathy circuits.

She realised she was stepping considerably more heavily than she was generally accustomed to doing and vaguely wondered about ceasing the admittedly somewhat childish reaction.

Nah, she thought, and revelled in the loud, obnoxious crunch and the slight shock that ran up her calf whenever a thin branch was unfortunate enough to be in her path.

Did she want to leave him? prodded a thought.

She paused to consider. Illa nearly ran into her, so she started to walk again, but carried on thinking.

No, she decided. One little spat wasn't enough to drive her away from the life she'd wanted more than anything.

The prodding thought retreated almost sulkily, and she shook her head sharply to rid herself of the suspicion that it hadn't been entirely hers. What telepathic being would want to be in her head, anyway?

-BAD WOLF-

_Yep, completely failed. QI'yaH._

_Just have to try again..._

_..._

_...Meh, I'll leave it for now. Might as well keep the alternate Doctor from sulking all the time. Sulky Doctors tend to blow up things more often, and more recklessly, than normal ones._

_What's that?_

_Stop it! He is NOT growing on me! I just don't want any galaxies completely annihilated simply because the Doctor is too depressed to care about them, that's all._

_Like _you'd _know. Trust me, he's even more careless about threatening buttons when he's on his own._

_Oh, have it your way..._

_But this doesn't mean he gets to keep her._

-BAD WOLF-

It was roughly a forty-five minute trip, but it felt longer for the oppressive, almost palpable silence.

The Doctor was still in denial, Rose was still sulking, and Vynn and Illa had no idea what to make of it. All in all, the situation, Rose deemed, had a distinct tinge of the adjective "crap".

And her ankle still hurt. She had been forced to give up stomping along the path because of that bloody ankle, and the cessation of that activity did not make her particularly happy.

The forest cleared, revealing the aforementioned hill that the Doctor had been so keen to reach, and Rose realised that the sun had actually begun to rise while they had been stuck in the darkness between the trees. Glancing back, she discovered that she probably would have found that out earlier had certain emotions not been very much in play.

The Doctor ran up the slope and Rose dashed unevenly after him, ungainly on the uneven and springy ground.

He glanced at the horizon, glared at it for a moment, and then suddenly flopped down on the ground in a surprisingly neat cross-legged position with the box perched in his lap.

"Thought you'd finished it," objected Rose, folding her legs underneath her and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as the wind whipped about in an unforeseen direction.

"Gwssnddayfnjsmn," said the Doctor around a chunk of metal that Rose couldn't identify.

"Say what?"

He pulled the metal bit out of his mouth and dropped it on the side of his knee instead. "Just need to make a few adjustments," he said, seeming a little irritated at having to repeat himself.

Rose furrowed her brow at him, but decided that "irritated" was better than "completely silent" and let it go in favour of studying the machine he'd made while she was sleeping.

It was a thoroughly Doctorish contraption, being an odd mix of genuinely dangerous objects and things that looked like pens and disco balls (and Rose was sure she'd spotted some sequins somewhere on the bottom, just before he put it down). There wasn't any set direction in which it seemed to be pointing, so she assumed that the opening of the box was it— but then again, she'd been wrong before.

"How much time's left?"

"Well," he said, poking at something that looked for all the world like a Rubik's cube, "technically speaking, the heliovore won't actually reach the sun for about six hours and even then it'll take about eight minutes for the notable lack of heat and light to have any effect. But," he added, apparently satisfied with that part of the amalgamation as he suddenly decided to turn it over and start poking at that side with his screwdriver (She was amused at the confirmed sighting of several obnoxiously pink sequins covering what appeared to be a holo-projector), "that's not the time we have."

Well, at least he was talking, she thought. That was good. "So what's the time we have?"

"Meh," he said, picking at one of the sequins with a disgusted look, only to find that his fingernails were inadequate for the task, "the machine itself needs a few minutes to power up and the signal will take about... ooh... half an hour to reach the heliovore. Wouldn't be that difficult, except then, of course, we've got to get back to the TARDIS and then use her as a very concentrated gravity source to shift the creature away from the real star. Heliovores don't really propel themselves, they just sort of float about a bit until they latch on to a centre of gravity, i.e. a star, and then they let that pull them in."

He paused for a moment.

"We've got about two minutes."

She took pity on him, leaned over and pried the sequins off with the nail of her forefinger.

"Thanks," he said, sounding genuinely relieved. He plugged the sonic screwdriver into the open end of the box for a moment, and the contraption began to hum more powerfully.

"And now," he said, putting the screwdriver back in one of his myriad pockets, "we run."

He carefully placed the box on the ground, the side directly opposite of the opening facing towards the sun and its predator, scrambled to his feet and demonstrated his order.

Rose jumped up and half-ran, half-limped after him to join Vynn and Illa. When they reached the bottom of the hill, they turned to look at the odd little device which might just save a planet.

It glowed, practically singing with power now, and Rose felt a smile curve her lips upwards. She glanced at the Doctor and saw a similar expression beginning to take over his features.

She was just beginning to experiment with the idea of taking his hand when sparks jettisoned wildly from the contraption, the hum of energy taking on a sick quality as the pyrotechnics continued.

-BAD WOLF-

Gotta love cliffies. RTD says so.

Chibi!Illa's been terribly depressed ever since she learned what's going to happen next chapter, but I've talked with her and she says that reviews might convince her that it's worth it.


	10. The StarEater, part V

-announcer voice- And now the conclusion.

SIAPNIAN: The next episode is the first one set in the past. It's got Jane Austen in it. (Yes, Kate, you can start squeeing now.) I've got the basic plotline for it, but I'm currently going through the Holy-Crap-I'm-About-To-Write-Something-Set-In-The-Past,-And-Oh-Sweet-Rassilon-It's-Got-Jane-Austen-In-It,-What-The-Hell-Am-I-Thinking stage. So it's not going to show up for a while, I'm afraid. Sorry, but I panic easily.

**Disclaimer: **I own the crumpled picture of an eye with a tear coming out of it sitting right next to me and the beautiful things that are currently happening with my walls, but not much else.

**Non-Warning: **Betad the lovely TCASM.

**Random German Thingie that No-One Cares About (RGTTNOCA): **Warum spielst du dieses Lied so laute? Weil wünschen wir zu! Weil wünschen wir zu!

**WARNING: **I've switched thingies from TextEdit, which has no pages and no word count and therefore forces me to rely on the size of the little scrolly thing to approximate the length of my chapters, to Word, which has both. If this one's a little shorter than it should be, I apologise. I tried for around 3,500 words, because I think that's generally what the average for these chapters is, isn't it? Anyway, if it's off, I'm sorry. It's not my fault.

Sort of.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor's somewhat happy expression abruptly changed to one of complete terror.

"What is it?" asked Rose, backing away to stand behind him. She felt a bit safer there. "What's happening?"

"Is it working?" inquired Illa hopefully.

The Time Lord didn't answer, just pulled out his sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the device. If anything, it sparked more violently and the Doctor instinctively stepped back, glaring just a bit at the screwdriver as it emitted a rapid series of beeps.

He said something that the TARDIS didn't translate, but Rose recognised from the days of her first Doctor. Something to do with sheep.

At any rate, it was bad.

"What's gone wrong?" she demanded, voice going up in both volume and pitch at his silence.

"The energy converter that I got from you wasn't completely integrated into the system," he said, glaring. "It's come loose."

"And... does this mean that the planet's just going to lose its sun, or does it mean that we're all gonna die?"

"Well," he said, all flippancy gone in the face of the danger, "what with the amount of power flooding through that thing, when it goes it'll take out half the planet with it."

"Brilliant," said Rose. No mere life-or-entire-planet-goes-boom situation would keep her from sarcasm.

"What do you need to do to fix it?" asked Vynn. There was a strange note in his voice that Rose recognised, but couldn't quite place. It gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"Plug the converter back in," answered the Doctor, "but I'd have to deactivate it first or it would completely atomise whoever got close, and in order to deactivate it I would have to get close." He turned to face Rose, tense with an unnameable emotion.

"I'm sorry," he told her quietly, barely audible over the screech of dying machinery, and the sheer sincerity in his voice _hurt._

"Don't," she growled at him, waving her forefinger at his face. "We've had this conversation before."

The Doctor opened his mouth, but didn't have time to argue with her about anything. A split second after the conversation had been initiated, an unearthly screech erupted from Illa.

_"VYNN!"_

Rose flinched, the Doctor spun around, and the Time Lord's companion stopped breathing.

The human in question had taken off while the Doctor and Rose were distracted and was now charging up the hill, heading straight for the still-sparking mechanism.

Not a single one of those he left behind moved. He stumbled, but reached the device, falling on his knees beside it. Rose saw him reach inside for a moment even as he began to dissolve, and she quickly hid behind the Doctor, closing her eyes. It might not be all blood and gore, but it was a horrible way to die and she wasn't about to watch.

She could hear, though, and the scream of mortal anguish mingled and harmonised with the howling shriek coming from the amalgamation sent ice water flooding through her veins.

It wasn't easy desensitising to death.

The duelling cries abruptly ceased. Vynn was silent, the machine returned to its original hum, and Rose dared to peek over the Time Lord's shoulder to see what was happening now.

The human was gone. All that was left was a perfectly docile device, thrumming rhythmically. Bright blue rings pulsed from one end at regular intervals in time with the variations in the hum, aimed directly at the glowing gas cloud in the brightening red-tinted sky.

The faintly crying Illa tried to stumble forwards, but the Doctor caught her arm to stop her.

"You can't go up there," he told her.

"But he could still be alive," she protested, eyes wide with pure denial. "He could have..."

"Illa, not even I could survive that," he said softly, releasing her forearm after a moment.

The girl, visibly numb, turned back towards the place where her brother had been and Rose bit her lip, unsure of what else to do.

The Doctor turned to her. "I need to get back to the TARDIS to pull the heliovore away," he said. "Are you...?"

"No, I'm coming," she assured him. He began to walk away, presumably knowing where he was going, and, with a final glance and quietly murmured apology to Illa, she followed.

-BAD WOLF-

_Well, that went well. I think I'm getting the hang of this, fiddling about with events while in another universe... Should probably keep it from Q, though. He'd probably turn it into a game and then end up destroying a few galaxies._

_Oh, shut up. It was Vynn or the entire bloody planet. And Rose. And the Doctor. Well, he's not the Doctor, but he is..._

_Never mind._

_Rassilon, I hate parallel universes. And clones. Clones can be bothersome too. And that is, of course, why I caught, interrupted and eventually managed to prevent that whole Davros fiasco. Really, for the most intelligent mortal in the universe, that Time Lord isn't half thick._

_Yes, a hyperintelligent pan-dimensional being uses phrases like that. And since you were wondering, I look nothing like a mouse in your dimension and without a host. Do not compare me to those children._

_Seriously._

-BAD WOLF-

"Told you never to assume there wouldn't be running," shouted the Doctor.

Rose ducked quickly to avoid a threatening bramble. It whipped across her cheek instead of catching on her shirt. One of the thorns bit into her skin and she hissed with the momentary pain.

"I'll put that on the list of things never to say when with you," she called back. "Right behind, 'Nothing can possibly go wrong'." She'd decided to adopt the Doctor's tactic and had simply ceased to think about Illa's plight. She could figure that out on her own. She could not, on the other hand, save the world. Rose could, or could at least help with it, therefore she chose that option.

"That is a nasty one," he agreed amiably. "Along with, 'How could anything be worse than this?'"

"Yeah, made the mistake of saying that one a few times." As another thorny branch caught on a tangle in her hair, Rose wondered how the Doctor could avoid all the vegetation that seemed intent on causing his companion every possible discomfort.

"Do we really have to be running?" she asked him after a moment.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know how far away the TARDIS is."

Rose growled quietly to herself. "Brilliant," she muttered under her breath. "If you don't know _where _she is, I am going to be far more of a threat to your life than any murderous gas cloud."

"Duly noted."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "You do know where she is, right?"

"She's telepathic, Rose."

"I know she's telepathic," she said, a little sulkily. "You just never used it to locate her before. I mean, other you."

He turned his head to look at her. "Really?"

She nodded. Not having run for her life on a daily basis in some time, she was a little bit out of practise and would much rather utilise her breath to avoid falling over.

"Hmm," he said as he looked around again. She was suddenly intensely jealous of his ability to turn around, keep talking, keep running, and yet still manage to avoid killing himself. "Was other me's TARDIS a particularly ornery individual?"

Rose thought for a moment. "She was a bit, yeah."

"Mine went through a bit of that too," the Doctor agreed. "Eventually figured out that if I rewired a couple of circuits and kept a room continuously filled with chocolate, she would deign to converse with me."

This comment surprised his companion sufficiently to make her very nearly trip and kill herself on something. "The TARDIS likes chocolate?"

"Who doesn't?"

She couldn't argue with that and didn't have the breath to anyway.

"So she's telling you where she is," she panted, "but not how far away?"

"Nope." He paused to inhale. "Chocolate can only do so much for an inherently stubborn spaceship."

"Have you told her," she began (Her ankle was really bothering her now. That, coupled with the ever-increasing fire in her diaphragm, gave her quite a lovely rhythm of throbbing pain. If she were a songwriter, she might have used the cadence.), "that your companion really needs that information, as she wants to know whether or not she wants to kill herself?"

"Aww, it's not _that _bad."

"Is if you haven't done this properly in ages, you're human and therefore susceptible to exhaustion, and you ran into an inconveniently placed hole in the ground earlier in the day."

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, he almost sounded surprised.

"She really likes you," he said.

Rose swallowed to try and moisten her throat. It didn't work. "She told you, then?"

"No."

"And that means that she likes me?" she asked, incredulous.

He glanced at her. "She didn't tell me how far away she was," he said. "She moved closer."

Had the ship been within reach, Rose probably would have hugged her. "Where is she now?"

He pointed, indicating a hill before them. The forest had thinned out considerably, so the Time Lord's companion was able to ascertain the degree of the slope— which didn't appear to be that difficult to scale— and, nestled like a beacon of safety and comfort underneath the treacherous branches of a particularly evil-looking tree, there stood the most beautiful object the human had ever seen in her life.

As the Doctor stuck his key in the lock of the door, Rose leaned her cheek against the worn wood, feeling the spaceship's welcoming thrum against her skin. The warm pulse in her mind shifted slightly, expressing a sort of apology.

"She says she's sorry she couldn't come closer," clarified the Doctor as the door creaked open. She could have sworn he sounded a little sulky.

She stroked the smooth surface gently. "It's all right," she told the ship directly. "I would have had a hard time finding a decent place to land too."

The strands of the timeship's consciousness shifted again and the vague sadness vanished.

"Come on," said the Doctor, stepping back. Rose reluctantly removed herself from the solidity of the TARDIS exterior to walk inside, and he followed.

"Why does she never do that sort of thing for me?" he asked no-one in particular.

Human and timeship laughed. Human saw Time Lord approaching the controls of timeship and very wisely decided to sit down.

He was heard to mutter something along the lines of, "Dear Rassilon, what have I got myself into?" just before he pulled a lever and sent them shuddering into the Vortex.

After a moment, Rose spoke. "If Kvneerie—"

"Qvnaerie."

"Whatever. If it was deserted because of the heliovore, than doesn't that change history? I mean, if the rockets left before overpopulation and all the stuff you said?"

"Nope." The Doctor circled the console. "Travelling more quickly than the speed of light is very carefully monitored. They'd have to get permission first and by the time that started to go through, someone would have noticed that the heliovore wasn't there any more."

"And how long would we have to stay here before the heliovore isn't here any more?"

"Ordinarily? A very, very long time. But I've basically put things on fast-forward so we can be done in a few minutes."

Rose shifted, wincing a little bit. "And then what?"

He turned to look at her.

"Wanna go check up on Illa?"

-BAD WOLF-

"What are you going to name him?"

Illa looked down at the baby in her arms— her firstborn, a son. If she'd been much for Old Earth tradition, she would have counted that extremely lucky. He had finally settled down and gone to sleep, and everything seemed to be in working order; all he needed was a name.

Really, there was no choice; she'd brought it up a long time before and her husband— to use the old term— had had no problem with it. It wasn't a particularly bad name and it was the name of the man who saved the planet when all hope was lost.

She looked out the window at just the right moment to see two familiar figures, one in brown pinstripes and the other wearing an outfit that looked oddly like it came from the early 21st century. She smiled softly; they returned the gesture, and she looked down at her son.

"Vynn," she said after only a moment's hesitation. "His name's Vynn."

When she glanced up again, her observers were gone.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose, being too unsteady to keep her balance amidst the renewed shaking of the TARDIS's flight, fell and landed ungracefully. She did, however, manage to keep from sustaining any form of serious injury and had been planning on not standing any more anyway, so she remained quite peacefully in her spot on the grating while the ship shook all around her.

The Time Lord made a few final adjustments— which Rose knew kept them hovering in the Vortex— and walked around to the human still sitting on the floor. Despite her protests, he helped her to her feet.

"Now," he told her, "I haven't had the coral theme for long, but I have sat on that floor for long enough to tell you that it is by no means as comfortable as the previous one." He led her to the battered chair by the console. She settled down on that and he sat next to her.

She glanced over at him and her heartbeat unexpectedly quickened. Not her Doctor he might be, but he seemed to have inherited the faintly hypnotic talent his counterpart had always unwittingly used on her.

He'd also inherited the eyes.

He reached up, fingertips grazing the cheek that had suffered the wrath of the vegetation. She told herself, very firmly, to breathe. He wasn't her Doctor— never had been, never would be. He was _a _Doctor, just one of the many definite-article Time Lords there were in the multiverse, and she should most definitely not be having this sort of reaction to his proximity.

"You're bleeding," he informed her, voice soft.

She blinked. "Am I?" She touched the still-stinging flesh herself and brought it into view. The faint crimson line on her skin was an almost-successful distraction from the presence of the Time Lord before her.

"I am," she acknowledged.

As her honey-coloured eyes left his to gaze at the blood on her fingers, the paralysis that had seized the Doctor's diaphragm melted away and he managed to take a jerky breath. He had honestly been merely concerned about the scratch on her cheek— no telling what even such a minor injury could do to a creature with such an insufficient metabolism as a human— but… And if she had been any other companion it would have remained pure, friendly concern, but… dear Rassilon, the simple act of breathing and speech and heartsbeat hadn't been that affected by anything since he was injected with a deadly neurotoxin a few regenerations back.

Inherent telepathic talents directed towards him, he told himself.

"Where'd you get it from?" he inquired of her. Good, he told himself. Objective. Needed to know if she was poisoned.

"Thorny branch." She glanced up at him. The greenish light from the console fell on her face, giving her features a mysterious air and putting glittering green highlights amongst the gold-tinted honey colour of her eyes, and the paralysis set in again.

"Is it dangerous?"

"Could be." Was it just him, or had his voice gone down an octave?

"Should we check?" It must have just been him. Hers had softened and dropped a bit as well.

"Probably best," he agreed. He wanted to clear his throat but it was suffering the same form of paralysis as his diaphragm.

This did not bode well for his survival.

A thought, a memory, came up from the deep dark where he had locked it away and hit him right between the eyes.

_"What I can do with this thing is nothing compared with what you've already done without one."_

The sudden starburst of pain jumpstarted his ability to breathe and think. As quickly as he could, he scanned the wound with his sonic screwdriver and got up, going over to the console and flicking some switches. He wasn't sure what they did and didn't much care.

He'd figured out that he wasn't upset with her. He had figured out some time ago whom he was upset with; he just wasn't sure how he felt about it.

"It's all right, then?" she asked him. Her voice was back to normal, if it sounded a little bit hesitant.

"Fine."

She was silent, and pain throbbed in his right heart. It wasn't her fault.

She stood up, weaving slightly on much-abused legs, and stepped carefully over to him. He didn't look at her, even when she leaned on the console to ascertain his expression.

"I'm sorry," he said eventually.

She blinked; this had obviously not been what she was expecting. "What?"

He looked at her and repeated the statement.

She put a hand to her heart, feigning astonishment. "The Doctor is _apologising?_"

He rolled his eyes.

"Now," she continued, a wicked light beginning to form in her clear eyes, "I have seen everything."

He raised an eyebrow at her, vaguely affronted.

She tucked a strand of unruly hair behind her ear and looked down. "'M sorry too."

Without any conscious order from himself, his legs had taken him the short distance needed to enfold her in his arms. She sighed and relaxed in the loose embrace, the physical and emotional tension almost tangibly flooding away from her.

He was a little surprised— at himself for the unexpected need to hug her, her for her instant reaction to the hug and the fact that she had understood he had been speaking of his behaviour towards her weapon. After a moment, however, he decided that the answer to all three of those questions was very simple: she was Rose Tyler.

That was all the reason he would ever need.

-BAD WOLF-

Thank God that's over and done with. Thought the cursed episode would never END!! -falls over-

Right, few… announcements, for lack of a better term. ONE. In honour of me surviving yet another revolution around Sol (On 24 August, specifically), I am planning an update!spam. Every single unfinished story, except this one, will be updated. TWO. Once again, the next pseudo-episode will have Jane Austen in it. I am still panicking about this. C. I like cheese. D. Please keep up the reviewing. Last chapter, or maybe it was the chapter before, was fantastic when it came to feedback. E. Is it just me, or do all the people who love Billie Piper's music, including myself, have no idea why they love Billie Piper's music? SIX. There is NO Rule Six.

May the Force be with you.

(PS: Why you gotta play that song so loud?)


	11. Amusement and Abduction, part I

All right. I know that this episode won't be good, I know that Jane's personality will probably be nothing like her, I know that I will accidentally write at least three historical discrepancies. However, I also know that you will hunt me down and kill me if I don't update, and that our dearly beloved Jane won't go away if I just ignore her, so I have slipped into a distinct just-write-the-bloody-thing-and-get-it-over-with phase. I apologise for all the crappiness that will surely be ensconced in the following five chapters, but history has never been my strong point.

**Disclaimer: **Mum and I painted David Tennant on my bedroom wall (I've posted pictures on dA, if anyone's interested) and there is Doctor Who paraphernalia scattered throughout the house, but I don't own Doctor Who. Or David Tennant. (Pity.) And the closest I can currently get to saying that I own Jane Austen is saying that I own a copy of _Pride and Prejudice_, which I do, but even so, I don't own her or anything vaguely related to her. In short, I'm playing with stuff that isn't mine. Yay!

SIAPNIAN: I have taken to putting a preview of the next chapter on the end of each update. Woo!

**Apology: **The title of this episode is bad and stupid and I'm sorry, but my brain feels fuzzy right now. If anyone can think of a better one, please tell me.

**WARNING: **Un-beta'd.

_This is part of the Celebratory Update Spam._

-BAD WOLF-

It was nighttime. Specifically, it was that particular shade of nighttime when everything is dark and still and somewhat magical (or creepy, depending on who you ask), when the stars glitter coldly as pinpricks in a heavy black blanket of sky, when everyone is either asleep or has fallen into a sort of restless half-awake state of dreams, and when the silence is so deeply sacred that the only things that dare to violate it are the eternally self-important breeze and the single spaceship descending from the high reaches of the atmosphere.

It was quite a lovely spaceship, especially if you knew anything about spaceships. Streamlined and of a shape rather like an oval with points at each end, it descended gracefully through the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere as if silly things like gravity and the wind (irritated now that there was something much, much more interesting than itself hanging around) did not exist. The fascinatingly shiny hull glowed bright silver in the moonlight, mimicking the radiance and beauty of that distant satellite so perfectly that it almost seemed that the orb had descended to Earth. Except, of course, that it hadn't.

It wasn't a particularly large ship, the cockpit being of a size to admit perhaps a million or so mosquitoes, if they were prepared to be suffocatingly friendly; however, in more generally accepted terms, it would comfortably house two very slender four-foot-tall humanoids. Before the smooth, nicely cushioned chairs there glittered an array of controls and displays of the sort of precise complexity that would make Rodney McKay weep with delight. Behind the smooth, nicely cushioned chairs there was a wall that artfully concealed the second compartment of the ship. On the smooth, nicely cushioned chairs there were two creatures, conveniently very slender and about four feet tall.

"Are you sure this is the one?" asked one of the other. Actually, to be absolutely precise, it said, "Fe, dell tey ep de ekka ep?" However, as very few people outside the Tel themselves understand their language, their speech shall be translated. This Tel's voice was like its ship: smooth and shining and achingly beautiful.

"Yes," replied the other. Its tone was much the same, if slightly more melodic, and it seemed the more feminine of the two by most standards; however, as any seasoned interplanetary traveller will tell you, this was by no means an infallible manner of gender assumption. "All the others of this sort fade away or fluctuate in their fame, but Zgheynn—" her unmistakable accent would not allow her to pronounce a soft J— "is revered throughout time."

The first speaker hummed. "It is a long way to go nonetheless. Especially for a mere hatchling."

"The Tai'ek wished it so. Who are we to defy her?"

Another hum, this one with a hint of reluctant agreement, and the creature slid its smooth fingers over the controls.

The spaceship's soft thrumming barely changed as it glided forwards. The more feminine creature leaned forward to examine a dial. It made an odd noise of satisfaction in the back of its throat.

"An artist and a writer," it noted. The tense it used is not easily translated in speech, but it was used to indicate possibilities.

"Ignore the artist," said its companion. "We have already collected enough of those, and I do not wish to remain on this world."

"It does get tedious after the fourth time," agreed the other, and pressed a complex code into one of the screens. There was a faint _shzhoom _sound from the engines and just like that, the second compartment of the ship was filled.

As the shining object vanished, leaving the air to close around it with a surprised noise, the possibly-future-artist frowned a little and rolled over in her sleep.

The writer was gone.

-BAD WOLF-

And there you have it. Feel free to hum whatever version of the theme song you like.

Note: I have slipped out of the habit of begging for reviews (Threatening, yes. Begging, no.), sort of, but I am going to ask you now, as my birthday was yesterday, I have a _really _wicked cold going on which should have started slacking off two days ago and instead has been getting worse, and I'd REALLY love some reviews from someone other than random-tuesday to cheer me up. No offence to random-tuesday, of course. Without you, I'd be a lot more depressed than I am right now.

_Next time:_

_The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't have put you down as an Austen fan," he said. He considered the previous statement. "No offence."_

_Rose shrugged, drumming her fingertips on the battered leather beneath her. "There's a lot you don't know about me," she replied._

_The Time Lord's eyes flickered over his companion. Yes, he didn't say. Far too much._


	12. Amusement and Abduction, part II

Well, the only other things to do were get extremely irritated at N (the game, not the letter; the letter never hurt anyone) and study, so...

Well, that went well. Then again, Jane Austen wasn't doing much, so I suppose it would. And yes, I'm going to insist that this is all crap even after it is long gone.

**Disclaimer: **I own my own personal version of Ten. Past that, not much.

**WARNING: **I think it's pretty self-explanatory that I've never been in the 1700s. I don't know what they did there. Don't know what they looked like, don't know much. All the stuff ensconced in the following four chapters was scavenged from Wikipedia, a brief Google search (Do you know how hard it is to find pictures of eighteenth-century dresses that someone who regularly finds herself running every time she so much as _looks _at something with a skirt attached would be caught dead, alive or partially decomposed in??), and the movie _Becoming Jane_, which I watched several months ago and don't own either, and sincerely hope (although also sincerely doubt) contained some form of historical accuracy. I don't know.

**Non-Warning: **Betaed by Aelita Madeline, KateCarter, and Brona19. (Do you think I might have been nervous about this episode?) Nearly betaed by TCASM, but not, because I'm impatient.

**Note: **The Doctor's character might be slightly off in this chapter. "How can this BE??" you ask, even though you don't. Well, it's because I've been watching an undue amount of _Spaced _and reading a hell of a lot of our dearly beloved Jane and actually _working _on my schoolwork for once in my life, so it's all a little fuzzy. Sorry.

SIAPNIAN: Sushi is good.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor paced.

He knew a lot about humans. One couldn't travel with them for over a thousand Earth years and not pick up a few bits of information about them.

One of the things he knew about humans was that they needed an undue amount of sleep. Another was that this amount was rather increased by the length of the day and the difficulty they had encountered in getting through it. Yet another thing he had learned about them was that, being lazy creatures, a large number of them liked to stay in a vague sort of half-awake state quite a bit longer than even their ridiculous need for rest entailed.

He understood that Rose was human. He understood that not only had she basically been awake for two days, but also that those two days (well, one day, seven hours and thirty-six minutes, assuming that she hadn't slept well— which he had a nagging suspicion that she hadn't, considering the chemical imbalances he could detect in his companion) had been particularly difficult ones. Physically and emotionally, he acknowledged with a mild guilty start. He could therefore understand that she would need quite a bit more rest than was normal for any human.

He could understand all of this. What he _couldn't _understand was why it was still happening.

Fourteen hours, eleven minutes and twenty-seven seconds ago she had wobbled tiredly out of the console room in search of something large and soft. And now that was fourteen hours, eleven minutes and thirty seconds ago, and she had still not appeared.

Maybe something was wrong.

The TARDIS instantly denounced this theory with a distinctly insulted air. She liked the girl, as she had assumed her behaviour towards her for the entirety of their acquaintance had proven, and did not wish her any harm. If anything had gone wrong, which it hadn't, she would have told the Doctor instantly and probably fixed it herself. Honestly, he—

"Okay, point taken," he snapped at her. "You can stop now."

She silenced, lights dimming slightly in her version of a glare.

Fourteen hours, eleven minutes, forty-two seconds.

Fourteen hours, eleven minutes, forty-three seconds.

Fourteen hours—

He should stop counting. Preferably now, before she shorted out _all _of her navigation circuits and left him to float in the Vortex forever.

He shut up. Rose walked into the room and he shut up more.

He was staring. He knew he was staring. Was that rude? He thought it might be rude. He should probably stop staring. He should most definitely stop.

It was fairly apparent that she had raided the TARDIS wardrobe, as it was notoriously difficult to find something that was obviously from the 18th century in the 21st, unless one lived very close to a particularly ornery rift, and Rose didn't.

The item she had picked was, obviously, a dress. More to the point, it was dark green, mostly; a formation of fabric like a slender, slightly concave triangle of a sort of pale sage colour split the skirt, running from her waist down to the floor, but apart from that it was dark green. The sleeves went to around halfway down her forearm, he was of course _not _noticing how far down the neckline dipped. The dark fabric was swathed around her curves (She hadn't had those before. Either that, or they just weren't on display. Knowing Rose and her varied quirks, he rather suspected the former) so perfectly that it looked like the garment had been made exclusively for her to wear it. Knowing his TARDIS, it probably had been. Her hair had been pulled back from her face in exactly the sort of way that someone who had no idea what else to do with it to make it fit in even slightly would do it, leaving only a couple of slightly damp golden strands free to curve along the side of her face. She rubbed her palms absently against her thighs and worried her lip, the picture of adorable bashfulness.

Not adorable. No.

He hadn't stopped staring. Why hadn't he stopped?

"What do you think?" asked the woman before him, fingers nervously tapping against the fabric.

He swallowed to try to reconstitute his throat. It didn't work. "It's good," he said. "It's really… good. It's…" He swallowed again. "Good. Very… umm…" He stopped himself. "Why are you wearing it?"

The TARDIS laughed at him.

In a not-impressive-at-all show of willpower he glanced away, looking at a completely innocuous switch and wondering why his hearts were thudding so rapidly in his ribcage. The sudden rush of blood made him dizzy and he surreptitiously used the console for support as he tried to manually slow his cardiovascular system before he had a fatal double arrhythmia.

"Jane Austen," she said. He lost interest in the switch and his eyes slipped disobediently back towards her as she pulled a stray lock of hair behind her ear, apparently more composed now.

He blinked and managed, by some miracle, to look at her face instead of what the dress did to her. The same miracle, however, did not manage to connect the three syllables she'd uttered to any logical thought, or keep the exceedingly complimentary things trying to get out of his mouth away from his vocal cords.

"What?" he said, instead. Green, he thought. He liked green.

Rose chortled— that was really the only word for it, he supposed. He was almost a little insulted; of course he was surprised at her appearance. Really. Seeing her in more 21st century attire for the entirety of his knowing her (or knowing _of _her, if he was being completely honest, which he wasn't and probably wouldn't ever be) couldn't possibly prepare him for seeing her in something else. It hadn't occurred to her that she might even wear anything else. Well, he supposed that it had been a niggling thought at the back of his mind, as traipsing around, say, the eighteenth century in jeans and a t-shirt might not be the best idea, but he'd never really thought it through. It was a shock; that was all. He was surprised. It wasn't that the dress made her look gorgeous; it was that he hadn't been expecting her to show up in it. Yes. That was it. His vocal cords could unfreeze now.

He liked green.

"I want to see Jane Austen," she clarified, stepping around the console and sitting on the chair. Her mild embarrassment had vanished in the face of his fascination and it had been replaced with a kind of faint and almost melancholy amusement. "You told me to think about where I wanted to go next, yeah?" she reminded him gently.

"Jane Austen?" he echoed. He got the distinct impression that his ship was laughing at him.

Green was a good colour. Especially—

He stopped that train of thought before he said anything stupid.

_You're enjoying this, _he accused his ship as her mirth went very firmly into the level of "hysterical".

"What?" she demanded of him, a little snappishly.

Something clicked, and he wasn't entirely surprised to find something like surprise exploding behind his eyes. "You like Jane Austen?"

"Yes," she said defensively, crossing her arms— and act which probably wasn't altogether the wisest thing she could have done, considering how low the neckline was in the first place. Not that he was thinking about that at all. No. Someone _else _might have thought about it. He was not thinking about it and the thought had only faintly crossed his mind because that someone else might have thought about it, and you never knew what someone else might do when a thought crossed someone else's mind. "What's wrong with that?" She seemed to realise the very thing the Doctor had not been thinking about and abruptly uncrossed the aforementioned extremities.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't have put you down as an Austen fan," he said. He considered the previous statement. "No offence."

Rose shrugged, drumming her fingertips on the battered leather beneath her. "There's a lot you don't know about me," she replied.

The Time Lord's eyes flickered over his companion. Yes, he didn't say. Far too much. One of the most important being why the simple act of her being in period clothing had taken the entire extent of his infinitely complex thought processes and winnowed them down to the knowledge that green was a good colour, despite the fact that he didn't even have a slight interest in her in any way other than what he normally felt for a companion. Well, a companion who didn't irritate the hell out of him, at least.

She sighed, shifting a little. "I started reading her stuff not long after I came here," she explained.

He leaned against the console. "Why?" he inquired of her, if only to distract her from the simple fact that his irrepressible urge to talk had been repressed.

She looked at the pulsating column in the centre of the room, eyes slightly unfocussed. "I was scared," she admitted. "Nothing here was really the same. She was the first thing I found whose parallel wasn't completely different— although I dunno," she added, frowning slightly. "Never knew much about her in the first place. Anyway, she seemed about the same, so I just kind of latched on. And then I figured out that I actually liked her stuff." She chuckled lightly.

"How far'd you get?" he inquired, sensing a melancholy mood descending over his companion and wishing to remove it as soon as possible.

She glanced over at him, gaze losing its distance. "Managed to get through _Pride and Prejudice _and was around halfway through _Persuasion _when you came along," she answered proudly.

Confusion etched a frown across his face. "_Pride and Prejudice_?" he echoed.

She furrowed her brow for a moment before realisation cleared her features. "_First Impressions, _sorry," she corrected herself. "She called it _Pride and Prejudice _back on my world."

He winced inwardly at "my world", but didn't remark on it. What was he to say, anyway? "Sorry, but there actually is a way back to your old universe, I just never told you because I'm a selfish git and want to keep you for myself?" Not bloody likely.

He liked green.

-BAD WOLF-

_Hopeless, he is. Absolutely hopeless. Possibly more so than my version. He should have seen it coming, really; he is the Doctor, and she is Rose. If the other one fell for her as hard and fast as he did, then what makes the parallel think that he'll be immune to her?_

_This does completely mess up my plans, you know. Not that they weren't messed up in the first place, but I had revised them. They went somewhere along the lines of antagonising them until the Doctor decided to drop her off with her original Time Lord, or putting the idea into Rose's head that since he'd said that when the others of his species were still alive, travel between parallels was possible, that maybe the addition of one of them would be enough, or some combination thereof, but if the Doctor keeps hanging on to her like he has been and will continue to do…_

_I do love them. I do. And don't get me wrong, the new Doctor is a fascinating individual, but he's not mine, and Rose doesn't belong with him and won't unless Q gets past my guard and starts fiddling with the timelines again, and he's so clumsy with them that he'd probably destroy the multiverse right then and there. And if the alternate would be so kind as to return my host back to me and our Doctor, then I would be so kind as to prod him over to another creature who has the potential of healing him as well as Rose can. He can even be in love with it, if he wants. I don't much care. I just want my host back where she belongs, with me and the real Doctor._

_Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and argue with some Ancients. Daniel's died again and they're thinking about not letting him Ascend any more if he keeps messing about with his powers like he does._

-BAD WOLF-

The unscheduled appearance of a ridiculously anachronistic police box in the late eighteenth century went even more unnoticed than it usually did. The squirrels and birds and assorted other innocuous creatures which were the phenomenon's most frequent observers were more interested in the humans, and the humans, imperceptive creatures by nature, were made even more oblivious by their own agitation.

Rose stepped out first, glancing around rapidly— partially in a keen interest to figure out where they were and partially in the completely founded suspicion that he had got the co-ordinates wrong again and she was about to find herself suddenly faced with sixteen angry aliens pointing guns at her. It wouldn't have been the first time.

Fortunately, however, everything looked normal from what she could detect, so she dared to step out into the open. The Doctor followed, closing the door behind him.

"So this is where she lived, yeah?" Rose inquired.

He made some form of acceding noise.

"Thought it'd be… I dunno." She faltered a little; the Time Lord was looking at her with that all-too-familiar "I pity you, you silly little rodent" expression. "More impressive?" she guessed.

The Doctor shook his head. "Nah, she didn't exactly take the world by storm— not for a while, anyway. Not until after she died in 1817."

She nodded. "When are we?" she inquired.

"We're in the eighteenth century. She should be at her creative height right now."

"Unless you've got the co-ordinates wrong."

He stared at her. "Rose Tyler, are you insulting my driving?"

"Always."

"I'd like to see you try."

"Did it pretty well the last time I did."

He gave her another look. This one very plainly said, in large block letters, "Don't be ridiculous."

"How many controls did I give you?" he challenged her.

She shifted uncomfortably. "Well, three, but—"

"How long did it take you to locate them?"

"Well—"

"And how many times did I save you from accidentally pressing something that would destroy the entire universe?"

She glared.

"There you are, then," he said triumphantly. "You can't insult me any more."

"Wanna bet?" she snapped at his retreating back, clumsily gathering her infinite skirts into one hand so that she didn't end up losing her balance even more than she usually did while walking on watery mud in ridiculously inadequate shoes.

Well, maybe "shoes" was a bit of an exaggeration.

"Humans," he muttered, as she caught up with him. "So irrational."

"You love us anyway," she accused him, tearing her eyes from the ground for long enough to grin at him.

"'Course," he agreed happily. "Besides, who wants rationality?"

Rose, having very nearly killed herself when she looked away from where she was going, only dared to split her concentration enough to make a vague sound of agreement before she was silent again.

The Doctor, noting her plight, took her hand and threaded her arm around his— although how in the name of all that was good and holy in the multiverse he could be so totally unfazed by the notably hazardous condition of the surface they were walking on, she had no idea. She wasn't about to refuse the support, though.

"Thanks," she said, as she removed her eyes from the ground again.

He started to speak, but suddenly frowned at something Rose couldn't detect and stopped in his tracks. She slid a little at the unexpected development, but kept her footing.

"What is it?"

"Hear that?" he inquired of her, glancing in her direction.

She concentrated. She could hear a vaguely discontented murmur coming from the house, but she couldn't decipher its full meaning.

"'S like…" She paused. "Shouting?" she guessed.

"Something's gone wrong," he said.

"Well, with you, that's a given," Rose remarked, but he had already dropped her arm and begun half-running towards the house.

-BAD WOLF-

Dun dun DUUNNNNNN!!

All right, so it's not all that remarkable or surprising.

Anyway, I had a thought. The thought was this: This is a parallel universe we're talking about. I can mess up details about our dearly beloved Jane. I can even name her Frederick and make her a lumberjack, and I can say that it's okay because it's a parallel universe. So any historical discrepancies should be put down as a very clever… alternate… thingie.

By the way, none of you care enough about this series to do this, but if you want spoilers (which, of course, you don't 'cause you actually HAVE a life outside of the ramblings of this distressed shipper, curse you RTD, SM, doubly so), I've started journalling. Conveniently, it's on Livejournal. Basically, I'm just babbling nonsensically and it inevitably turns to this, and I can't remember what I've already said regarding future chapters— or, indeed, if I've said anything at all. Well, I have now. And I'm probably going to stick little previews on them too. Like this one!

_Next time…_

_"Let me guess," said Rose as he came into view. "Jane Austen's been kidnapped by aliens who want to use her literary genius for their own nefarious purposes. Am I right?"_

_"Really, Rose. That's far-fetched even for me," he protested._

_"The bug-eyed monster behind you would disagree."_


	13. Amusement and Abduction, part III

…Still going well, but Austen's still not in it.

Disclaimer: A fifteen-year-old fangirl DOES own Doctor Who, but it's not this one.

SIAPNIAN: I found a barely-touched copy of _The Invasion of Time _shoved in a corner two shelves beneath Terry Brooks in a thrift store. I squeed. And then looked sad at my father until he got it for me. :P

**Reminder: THIS IS A PARALLEL UNIVERSE. Any historical discrepancies are the direct result of me being VERY CLEVER INDEED. Got that? Good. Let's continue, shall we?**

**WARNING: **Un-betaed. And for those of you who notice such things, no, the last poet in the list is not a particularly well-known one, nor are her works classics, although I am firmly persuaded that this unfortunate set of circumstances will not last. (Hi, sis. -grins-)

-BAD WOLF-

Events proceeded from that point in a mathematically predictable manner that Rose had discovered long before. This particular, startling equation was proven once again in that as soon as her mode of slightly less dangerous transportation showed himself, she had got to a point where she no longer needed his assistance.

"Let me guess," she said as the Doctor came into view. "Jane Austen's been captured by aliens who want to use her literary genius for their own nefarious purposes. Am I right?"

"Really, Rose," he protested. "That's far-fetched even for me."

"The bug-eyed monster standing behind you would disagree." She deadpanned the words with a skill and precision that would have impressed the object of their journey herself, had she actually been there to hear her. She started to cross her arms again and stopped.

The Doctor had spun around, screwdriver— which, Rose had noticed, was shaped a little differently from the one her old Doctors had used, bearing more of a resemblance to the older model her Doctor had discarded— in hand, almost before she had finished speaking.

The look he gave her when he faced her again was almost worth his brief abandonment to the nonexistent mercies of wet dirt.

She laughed at him outright. "Can't believe you fell for that," she giggled.

He glared. "Look, when—"

She waved a hand to cut him off. "So if Jane Austen hasn't been kidnapped by evil aliens bent on using her literary genius for their own nefarious purposes," she began before taking a moment to inhale, "Which I still think is extremely likely, but if it isn't, then what's going on?"

"Jane Austen hasn't been kidnapped by evil aliens bent on using her literary genius for their own nefarious purposes," shot back the Doctor, ten times more quickly than Rose had said it. "She _has, _however, gone missing."

Rose nodded wisely. She thought about commenting upon how this sort of thing seemed to happen every time she or the Doctor showed up anywhere, but refrained. She knew he already knew about this.

"Anyone know where she went?"

"Can't tell," he replied, rubbing the back of his neck absently. The painfully familiar gesture made Rose's heart twitch spasmodically in her chest with an equally painfully familiar half-emotion, which she crushed as soon as it showed itself. "They aren't being particularly articulate right now."

Rose now noticed that "they" had begun to file out of the house, milling uncertainly towards the Time Lord and the impression he gave that he knew exactly what was going on and how to stop it. She'd seen the ritual many times before.

"Not particularly articulate", in fact, was a bit of an understatement. A middle-aged lady was incoherent, gripping the arm of the person who, Rose assumed, was her husband to the point of pain. He himself didn't look very content, although whether it was because of the loss of blood to the aforementioned extremity, the loss of his daughter, or both, was indeterminable. The only one who looked like she might be able to string an understandable sentence together, a creature of roughly seventeen who bore a striking resemblance to what would happen if the two older humans copulated, also appeared extremely disturbed. The only difference with her was that she showed her concern quietly, with a bloodless complexion and a constant shaking that Rose could detect even from the distance that separated them. She deemed the others not important, ignored all but those three, and then ignored even those as she looked back to the Doctor.

"Are you sure that it's not alien?"

"Yes."

"_Absolutely_ sure?"

"Yes."

"Because you know that as soon as you say that it's most definitely one hundred percent not alien, bug-eyed monsters are going to come out of nowhere and kidnap us all for their own nefarious purposes."

He rolled his eyes; she grinned at him, a slightly mischievous look crossing her features for such an infinitesimal moment that he missed it.

It was, of course, shortly after this point when the Doctor suddenly became very, very alarmed. This unexpected sensation was brought on by another unexpected sensation at her next action.

She inched forwards and a little to the side, so carefully that he barely noticed her movement until she was suddenly very, very close to him. He could feel her typically human warmth even there and, without warning, the fabric and layer of air separating them seemed impossibly small. She gazed up at him, eyes soft and sparkling and filled with such a level of pleading that he could barely detect the glitter of devious amusement deep within her pupils. Her fingers found his elbow and trailed down his forearm to close gently around his left hand, which apparently had no choice but to reciprocate. This worried him, as did the sensation of all the oxygen leaving the immediate area to the extent that even his respiratory bypass system was baffled. He inhaled, a sharp, choking spasm of the diaphragm, but it didn't seem to help. So wrapped up was he in the movement of her lips and the melody of their hearts pulsing just that slightest bit out of sync that he barely heard her when she spoke.

"Could you at least look?"

He wavered. This was… wrong. This was bad. What was happening?

"All right," he said, feigning irritation as Time sped dizzyingly around him. His companion, unable to jump ecstatically, settled for a happy sort of bounce as he reached into his pocket for the sonic screwdriver.

This was bad, he thought. Very bad. He'd known she had a telepathic influence over him, but… this was bad. He was almost beginning to suspect…

No. Not even going there.

She abruptly stilled beside him as the screwdriver flicked on. "Are you scanning for alien tech?" she asked, voice quiet.

"Yyees," he said, very slowly, a little frightened of the ramifications of the word and stretching it out so that perhaps the consequences would dissipate with the extra time it took to say it.

They didn't. She yelped with pure joy and accosted him with a violent hug— which threw him off-balance. He stumbled forwards slightly, but managed not to fall down as he stared at her.

"I _love _you," she informed him happily, face buried in his chest, right where his left heart beat a little more quickly than it should. And then she went completely still. Utterly motionless, in fact.

He was frozen as well, stunned. Not by her words, maybe; he was familiar with the behaviour of human females in fits of extreme joy. What _did _surprise him, shock him, and otherwise render him incapable of normal functions was the jolt of electricity that shot through him at the syllables.

She twitched herself away from him, looked at the ground, and was silent.

The screwdriver beeped, releasing the almost tangible tension humming between them, and he let out a very minor Gallifreyan profanity which had her grinning. Not completely at ease, but grinning.

"I was right, wasn't I?"

"Well—" he tried.

She was not to be deterred. "Go on," she told him, poking him in the side. He twitched and prayed to whomever might be listening that she didn't notice. A Rose with hypnotic powers was bad enough; a Rose with hypnotic powers _and _the knowledge of his unfortunately Very Sensitive Indeed nerve endings was something he didn't want to think about at all.

He growled quietly and gave in, as it was obvious that it was the only way to satisfy her. "Jane Austen has been kidnapped by evil aliens bent on using her literary genius for their own nefarious purposes."

He didn't see her smile, but he might as well have. "Thank you."

-BAD WOLF-

_I am… slightly worried, let's call it. That's right. Slightly. Not so much about the not-Doctor and Rose; I'll sort that out later. Or maybe it's sorting itself out right now. Not entirely sure. Anyway, that's not the problem._

_The problem is the whole Davros fiasco, to use the aforementioned term. The problem with that is that it wasn't a problem. I shouldn't have been able to erase that so easily; it just doesn't happen. Something so complicated and strange as that? All those tangles? Not going to go away with a flick of thought. Not even I'm that good. And yet there it went._

_This worries me. This worries me intensely. And I can't figure out why, and this also worries me._

_I guess I'm just going to leave it alone until it makes sense, but all the same…_

-BAD WOLF-

Rose smiled quietly to herself. She was being insufferably smug and knew it, but didn't she have a right to be?

"Stop it," the Doctor snapped irritably.

"Stop what?" Rose inquired back, feigning ignorance. She grinned. She was happy.

He pointed at her upwards-curved lips. "That!"

She laughed. "You're so…" she began, and stopped. So what?

He made some form of irritated noise. "Everyone in the entirety of time and space knows you're right, so just… stop it. It's distracting."

His point made, he turned resolutely back to the console, whereupon he was promptly struck with a startling revelation in that he _really _wasn't that upset to be proven wrong. Oddly enough, he was paradoxically pleased. After a moment of self-examination, he realised with a start why— it had made Rose happy. Truly happy, not the false smiles and parroted laughs that were the mark of a creature who had nowhere to go and didn't know what to do about it.

He, of all people, should know the difference.

He risked a glance at her. The grin was no longer there, but she was regarding the interior of the timeship with a kind of impenetrable contentedness that bespoke the same emotion as her previous cheer.

He smiled unconsciously. After a moment, his gaze attracted hers and trapped it. A slow smile, beginning at her clear honey-coloured eyes, took over the rest of her face in an expression of such ineffable happiness that it forced his respiratory bypass to kick in again.

"What's that face for?" she inquired, fairly glowing in the green-gold light from the console and her own joy.

"Nothing in particular," he half-lied. Her felicity was infectious; he had definitely been right to bring her along.

She giggled a little and it was a sound purer and more beautiful than anything Mozart or Beethoven could even dream of inventing. He felt suddenly, with a shuddering clarity intense enough to be pain, that something in him had changed. No longer was he the lonely god, the solitary Time Lord who wandered through time and space only because he had nowhere to go; he was the Doctor, the last child of Gallifrey, the only creature in all the universe with the blood and power of the Triumverate in his veins, and his singular purpose— the one mission he would not, _would not, _compromise— was to make her happy. She was a goddess and nothing less, a creature who had seen Time and subdued it— a being Time itself worshipped in all its golden swirling glory— and she had deigned to trust him, to come to him willingly and make herself his companion.

He would not fail her.

-BAD WOLF-

"What is happening?" asked the more acceptably feminine of the two creatures. "Are we discovered?"

"We are," confirmed the other, turning aside to allow the presumably-female one to view the readings flitting across the screen. In the interest of not boring the audience, in addition to the fact that I am not completely sure what they said, they will not be described in any detail; suffice it to say that they were a particular cause for alarm for the two we are observing.

"Is it?" 'she' inquired softly.

'He' glanced over at 'her'. "It is," he replied solemnly.

'She' tightened exactly two of the muscles in 'her' jaw, or at least 'her' species' equivalent of a jaw. "He will be a difficulty," 'she' said carefully, "but not an unplanned one." 'She' straightened up. "I will check the status of our new installment," 'she' said as 'she' stepped towards the small cavity in the back of the little ship. "Inform the others he is coming."

"Immediately, _ver._"

-BAD WOLF-

After a further few seconds, the silent communion between the Time Lord and his companion was interrupted by the loud and somewhat annoying klaxon coming from the scanner.

The Doctor flinched in surprise and turned abruptly away, as if he had suddenly realised what he was doing and wanted to stop it before he got caught. Rose shivered and glanced at the grating, heart pounding unexpectedly in her chest; for a second there, she had thought... he'd looked at her like... like...

She killed that thought. She was confused enough already without worrying about a Doctor who loved her and wasn't afraid to admit it. Or was afraid to admit it. Or was just very bad at hiding it. Or...

"Eugh," interrupted the Time Lord in question. "Could have gone without dealing with them."

She glanced up at him. "Why? What are they?"

"They're the Tel."

"And... what do they do?" she prompted.

"I dunno. That's why I don't want to have to deal with them." He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

She raised her eyebrows at him. "The Doctor is turning down a challenge?" she inquired, incredulous.

"I'm not turning it down, I just don't want to do it." He glanced at her. "I do get tired of random species trying to take over things," he continued, playing with a few of the controls. "And when that continues to happen, I prefer it when it's the Cybermen or something so I already know how to beat them." He glanced back up at her. "Thanks for that, by the way."

"Wasn't me."

"You helped."

She frowned. "Not really."

The Doctor sniffed. "Well, I'm not thanking Mickey!"

"Rickey," Rose corrected him, tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as she grinned mischievously.

He rolled his eyes and went back to manipulating his timeship.

-BAD WOLF-

The Time Lord stepped out of the ship, glancing swiftly around before completely entering the hall. Rose followed, slipping past him and closing the door behind her.

They were in a dark hall. Rose half-expected it to be damp and smelly as well, but it actually appeared to be quite a nice hall despite the gloomy atmosphere. The air, if a bit thin and with the distinct metallic twinge of an unknown element, was surprisingly breathable considering they were in an alien...

She listened for a moment.

Space station. Smallish cubicles lined the walls, each one suspiciously human-sized. The Doctor stepped towards one and threatened it with the sonic screwdriver. The lock whirred in fear and the door slid open with a sharp, clean noise that bespoke perfect efficiency. Rose almost shivered at it, but then she noticed what was inside the cubicle.

The cubicles were suspiciously human-sized for a reason, it seemed. A teenaged boy of perhaps sixteen stood in the compartment, the antiquity of his simplistic dress a strong contrast to the various tubes and wires attached to him. Most prominent among those was a device attached to the top of his head, consisting of four plates of metal— each one covering a particular sector of his cranium, bisected on a central axis and another split perpendicular to that— that were, in turn, attached at their bottoms to his skull through circular pads that might or might not have been attached to the skin, and at their tops to a single central column of the same sort of metal that stretched to the ceiling of the cubicle. Something else that resembled a breathing mask covered his nose and mouth, attached to a tube which also vanished into the ceiling. There were various smaller lines that pierced various parts of his body, presumably to keep him alive; the rhythmic hissing and slow movements of the boy's chest betrayed breathing, and his eyes shifted rapidly under their closed lids. Screens and dials flickered with readings; there was a plaque below his feet.

"Robert Burns," the Doctor murmured, without even looking at the small plate that detailed that same name in unemotional, blocky lettering. With another flick of the screwdriver, he closed the door and started running down the hall, swiftly opening and closing the cells, announcing each one he found. "John Keats, Byron, Emily Dickinson, Decclasia of Kostor II, Lihe Duhy of Re, W. B. Yates, John Donne, George Herbert, Sir John Suckling, Tennyson, Typtha Rassnar, Sarah Lucille Marchant..."

"I think," he said, after a moment of reflection, "it's gone a bit beyond Jane Austen."

Silence.

He turned around. "Rose?"

There was nothing there— no Rose, no TARDIS, just the eerie glow from the chambers lining the walls. No sounds, just the whirr of life-support systems and the dismal hum of machinery. No life, except for the lonely _thump-thump-thump-thump _of his own hearts.

He took off running.

-BAD WOLF-

Ooh, drama! :D

I'd say that the faster you review, the faster these things will go up, but that is no longer the case. I've got a system now. Look at the bottom of my profile page if you want to find out what it is. Anyway, at the very least, the faster and more you review, the happier I will be, if that means anything to anyone. And I am truly sorry this took so long to write. I really am. I've been distracted with an original!fiction story that I want to finish so it will get off my frakking BACK and probably attempt to publish upon its completion. And I've gone into a bit of a poetry stage. And I've been entering writing contests and whatnot. And I've got Mum's Christmas present to work on (Pushing Daisies/Doctor Who crossover. Yes, my family is weird, and yes, I will be uploading it as soon as it's finished.) as well as Aelita Madeline's present, which isn't behaving itself. (Sorry. I'm working on it, though, I promise.) And I'm trying desperately to get KotOR II to work so I can beat it so I can write about that. So all that boils down to not updating this, for which I truly, dearly apologise. I hope that the length of this chapter will make up for the delay in its creation.

Please don't kill me.

_Next time..._

_"You will defeat the Doctor for us."_

_"No." Her tongue was heavy, hard to move, but she managed to grind out the negative even as purple spots began to overtake her vision._

_"You have no choice," replied the figure._

_The blackness got closer. "What have you done to me?" she hissed, before her legs gave out and she collapsed, striking the wall before sliding to a crushing halt on the cold stone floor._

_The last thing she felt before the darkness obliterated everything was the Doctor screaming her name._


	14. Amusement and Abduction, part IV

Ahh, back we are. Did you miss me? …No? Crap.

**Disclaimer: **I HAVE NOW READ _Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, _and _Mansfield Park _(in that order), and am now attacking _Sense and Sensibility._ (_Mansfield Park_, by the way, is AWESOMENESS INCARNATE. Brilliance.) Unfortunately, as wonderful as that is, it gets me no closer to owning either Jane Austen or the Doctor…

SIAPNIAN: If you really loved me, you'd do me the favour detailed at the ending A/N.

**Dedication: **Novacancymind for almost, but not quite, threatening me with death to make me finish the chapter. J

**WARNING!!:** Un-betaed and partially written late at night.

-BAD WOLF-

Dame Rose Marion Tyler of the Powell Estate was unsure of exactly how long she had been unconscious, or at least in this vague half-state of consciousness that had plagued her for however long it had plagued her. All she really knew was that she was on a floor— and a very hard and cold floor at that.

She was almost completely sure that she hadn't simply tripped and fallen over, as there _was _nothing to trip and/or fall over— at least, not the last time she had checked. In fact, she had been walking very carefully down the exact middle of the hallway to avoid tripping and/or falling over, as she still did not trust the dress she was wearing, nor the shoe-whatevers. She would have been quite happy to take them off, but she feared retribution as soon as she actually met Jane Austen or, indeed, anyone else from her century; hadn't she heard something about ankles?

She saw something swimming through what she sincerely hoped was the air, noted its distinctly not-brown-pinstripe colour and decided that she had bigger things to worry about than her ankles.

"Who are you?" she asked, panting slightly. She could feel blood trickling down her face, to her eyes. She wiped it away, but not before some had slid across her irises. It stung and her vision swam even more; she was fighting not to pass out, but could feel the darkness closing in on all sides... Where was the Doctor?

"We are the Tel," said the figure. "You will sleep now. You are needed."

"What for?" she asked, stumbling to her feet. She leaned against a wall and closed her eyes. The blood loss wasn't helping, but it wasn't the only thing that was making her like this; she knew what that felt like, and this wasn't nearly bad enough to cause her to pass out. Her bones felt like they were lead, her muscles lying limp and useless under silver-leaf skin. A bolt of fear passed through her; what was happening? Where was he?

"You will defeat the Doctor for us."

"No." Her tongue was heavy, hard to move, but she managed to grind out the negative even as purple spots began to overtake her vision.

"You have no choice," replied the figure.

The blackness got closer. "What have you done to me?" she hissed, before her legs gave out and she collapsed, striking the wall before sliding to a crushing halt on the cold stone floor.

The last thing she felt before the darkness obliterated everything was the Doctor screaming her name.

-BAD WOLF-

_Aww, how adorable. Isn't that lovely and wonderful? Of course it is._

_But, back to the more important things, I am very, very worried now. There isn't so much as an echo from Davros and his… Davrosness. There's nothing. I can't detect anything, not even the idea that that situation might ever have existed. He's not here. I don't know where he is— oh, come on, you know he's alive; when was the last time anything Dalek-related decided to just give up and die already, and stay that way?— but I know he's not here, or anywhere in particular that's terribly important, and he's not doing anything that the Doctor couldn't fix on his own, without the help of a clone of himself and Donna being… well… sort of me (Not really, though. Although I must say that messing about with the Dalek control systems is very clever and rather amusing to watch, it's not my style.) and a dozen other random people who, come to think of it, really didn't have much to do with the whole saving-the-universe thing._

_Anyway._

_The point is that nothing's re-happening, nothing's even TRYING to re-happen. There's nothing to say that what Davros did was really what he was supposed to be doing, and…_

_…Come to think of it, where's Donna's little scrap of Vortex spawn got to? I felt his creation, sort of (And no, I don't know what I mean by that either), but really, it should have taken more effort than that to erase a creature who had the potential to be almost a quarter as awesome as myself._

_This is very worrying._

_So, of course, I'm going to let you worry about it. I'm going to go and resurrect Wash. Emo-Zoë is no fun, and I cried when he went anyway._

_Oh, shush. I'm too amazing to have to use my entire consciousness (for lack of a better term) just to get some random human alive again and back where he belongs. Of course I'll still be thinking about it and watching Rose and the other Doctor, and as soon as I figure out what's going on I'll…_

_…Where did the other Doctor get to, anyway?_

-BAD WOLF-

The other Doctor, as the hyperintelligent pan-dimensional being perpetually stalking him liked to refer to him, was, at this moment, dead.

-BAD WOLF-

_Oops._

_Hang on._

-BAD WOLF-

The other Doctor, as the hyperintelligent pan-dimensional being perpetually stalking him liked to refer to him, was, at this moment, about twenty minutes from being dead.

-BAD WOLF-

_Argh!_

-BAD WOLF-

The other Doctor, as the hyperintelligent pan-dimensional being perpetually stalking him liked to refer to him, was, at this moment, about twenty minutes from possibly being dead.

-BAD WOLF-

_Fine. So you're one of those deaths that doesn't like abstract, definite kinds of erasure. I can deal with that. I just have to wait twenty minutes and hope that the changes figure themselves out in time._

_Oh, stop looking so smug. I can too resurrect Wash while keeping an eye on him, I just got a little distracted, that's all. Understandable, considering the MULTIVERSE MAY BE FALLING APART._

_No, that was not "pretty close, though"!_

_Bloody presumably-humans._

-BAD WOLF-

"Rose! Rose, where are you?"

His own voice, amplified and threaded into every speaker-equivalent in the building, echoed pitifully and slid into static.

"Rose, there's a panel on the wall. It should be glowing green and sort of rectangular. Could you touch that for me?"

The sonic ripples died away again, and the Doctor's spine twitched in an involuntary spasm.

"Rose!" _Rose! Rose! Rose!_

Quiet. Nothing. Dead sil… _No. _Just silence. Not dead silence. There wasn't even anything remotely injured about the silence.

He leaned against the wall. He would have liked to hope that she had just got herself caught in a stray teleportation sequence or was otherwise unharmed and able to contact him, but clearly that was not going to happen.

Damn.

On a space station of this size, though… He couldn't find her alone. Straightening, he turned, regarded the rows and rows of captive creative minds… and he smiled.

-BAD WOLF-

When Rose awakened once more, the first thing she detected was pain. It wasn't even a concentrated sort of pain to make her believe that she had somehow injured herself; it was _everywhere, _threading through every nerve in her body.

She felt something thin and metal pushing into the base of her skull, felt a thousand other filaments worming along distinct, familiar paths beneath her skin, and she realised with a jolt of fear that threading through every nerve in her body was _exactly _what the pain was doing.

She whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut even tighter, and silently whispered to herself that she was not afraid. She was Rose Tyler, the Bad Wolf, companion of the Doctor and defender of the Earth, and she was not afraid.

-BAD WOLF-

_Technically speaking, she's not the Bad Wolf, but—_

_"Shut up"? What do you take me for, your pet dog? You know, just for that, I should stop telling you this story right now—_

_Yeah, I bet you're sorry. Hmph._

-BAD WOLF-

"She is awake," murmured a creature. Rose cracked open her eyelids, but the sensors were messing with her eyes; as they forced themselves through the optic nerves, they had damaged her sight, and she couldn't tell what form of alien it was. She could dimly detect that it was a vague shade of grey— at least, she _thought _what that vaguely humanoid blob was; it might have been anything, she knew— and there were two of it. Maybe.

"I can see that," said what Rose thought was another creature. "Does she have anything useful in her memory?"

"She is the Doctor's companion. Some of the things in her mind are better than anything even Kafka could devise."

"Perfect," the second creature said, voice soft and melodic and, somehow, more menacing for it. "Thread it through the main computers— all of it. Full simulation."

"But, _ver_, we still have some _tel'ar'in _on the other levels of the station—"

"Call them back, then, but we have no time for a full evacuation. The Doctor is _here, tel'ar._ We have no more time."

As if to add weight to her words, a second after she had finished speaking, klaxons went off— not the loud, obnoxious, wailing kind of klaxons, but a calmly oscillating note as gently songlike as the creatures' voices themselves.

The presumably-subordinate creature hesitated for a moment. "As you wish, _ver._"

The other one seemed to relax at that. "Call the others back to work as soon as the Doctor is dead," she said. "Get all those creatures back into their cells before the preparation serum wears off and their brains become immune to the _lithiim._"

"Yes, _ver._"

Rose clenched her jaw tightly and reflexively offered up a petition to whatever might have been paying attention at the time that the Doctor would escape. She didn't matter. Just, please, don't let her kill the Doctor.

-BAD WOLF-

_Sigh. This is getting rather pitiful, actually. It's amazing, that creature's ability to resist my plans. I told her not to resurrect Jack— at least, not that thoroughly—, but did she listen to me? Nope. I told her to just let go of me for Rassilon's sake, but she didn't do that either. I had to force the Doctor to distract her before she would even let me transfer to him, let alone completely remove myself from everything. I told her not to get attached to this Doctor, but is she doing that now? Of course not. That would be logical. That would be healthy. That would be WHAT I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL HER TO DO._

_Honestly, sometimes I feel like Jackie, for all the notice she takes of me. And that is a very, very humiliating thing to feel like, let me tell you._

_Really, I'm just trying to help. She needs the Doctor. She does. Problem is, that Time Lord she's running around with is not, technically speaking, according to the most basic rules of interuniversal travel, the Doctor— at least, not insofar as she's concerned. She's not supposed to be there, she's not supposed to belong to him. She doesn't belong to him. So, of course, she's going to try, and he's not going to give her up, simply because they're obstinate and don't want to be good little boy and girl and not rip the Universe to shreds._

_I hate people sometimes._

-BAD WOLF-

Where the Doctor was, all was chaos. Thankfully, though, this was a normal circumstance for him, so he knew how to handle it.

"Just stay where you are and try not to talk to anyone," he sternly told the milling crowd of stunningly creative minds. He still didn't know who, exactly, the Tel were, but he had to admit that they had very good taste. In a slightly sick and demented way, admittedly, but these people and quasi-people had the best brain-equivalents in all of semi-humanoidkind.

He considered this thought for a moment.

"Come to think of it, don't look at anyone either," he added, as Hrrnhepther the Gglbar slurpled volipferously past, glurphing and hamulshing as he-she-it-they went. "Unless you're in science fiction and prepared to keep quiet."

Satisfied that his orders had been given and would promptly and efficiently be ignored, he turned to the glowing green panel he had previously informed Rose about, and proceeded to attack it with his sonic screwdriver. The device was valiantly attempting to hack into the sensor array, but unfortunately there were exactly three thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight security protocols to bypass, and the Tel were apparently advanced enough to know about the peculiar uses of advanced sonic technology.

It was going to take a while.

"Hold on, Rose," he murmured, hoping that her apparent innate telepathic abilities had not been compromised, and she could therefore hear him. "Just hold on a little longer."

There was, of course, an easier way of finding her, but he wasn't about to use it for several complicated and perfectly logical reasons. His own innate telepathic abilities would have easily located her, but with the confusion of all the minds around him, it would have been difficult to locate _himself_, let alone Rose.

Okay, so it was just one perfectly logical reason, and it wasn't entirely complicated, but there it was. His innate telepathic abilities would be, if not completely incapacitated, at least rather dazed.

Besides, he was out of practise; he hadn't used them in years. He hadn't had a reason to. At least, that was what he was trying to tell himself, and it appeared to be working.

So was the sonic screwdriver; there were only one thousand, two hundred and twenty-two security codes to go.

"Excuse me," said a voice politely, "but could you tell me what is going on?"

The Doctor winced. He'd been expecting this. "I'm really very sorry, but I can't tell you, Mr… umm…"

"Poe," supplied Poe.

The Doctor whirled. Well, not entirely; his arms and hands stayed firmly where they were, as did most of the rest of his body; his head whirled, and took in the sight before him.

"Poe?" he demanded, even though he could see very well that it was true.

"Yes," replied Poe, looking slightly confused.

_"Edgar Allan _Poe?" continued the Time Lord, maintaining his inexplicable disbelief.

"…Yes…" said Poe, frowning a little.

"Oh, this is brilliant," enthused the Doctor happily, and went back to work. "Don't go anywhere. I have a lot to ask you about."

"All right," said Poe hesitantly, but his tone conveyed exactly the opposite. "Might I ask who you are?"

The Doctor spared him a glance.

Now, the time between when the glance was given and when the Time Lord answered the question was roughly a second, but there were several thought processes whirring madly through his head that cannot be adequately explained while maintaining the pace of the narrative. Therefore, it shall be slowed for a moment while these thought processes are explained.

The first thing that entered his head was a question: why did they capture Poe at this stage in life rather than in his youth or just before he began to write at all, as seemed to be the trend with the other minds they had caught; his countenance was aged and the Doctor's timesense (besides noting that the lines around the man seemed to be in a unique sort of flux) informed him that he was, roughly speaking, forty years, eight months and eleven days old. The second thing, naturally, was an answer: this was shortly before the man had conceived what would be generally considered to be his greatest ideas ever, his best stories, his most beautiful poetry. The Tel had ignored his previous work, allowing his life to take him to exactly the point in time where he would be inspired to write the things that carried him to instant fame.

The Doctor mentally sniffed for a millisecond. He had always been partial to Poe's earlier stuff. So maybe the Tel didn't have as good a taste as he had initially supposed; oh well.

Ah, right, he had asked him a question. Who he was. That was a strange one, and difficult to answer. He wished people wouldn't ask him that; he had too many names by now, and that was ignoring his original one, his given one— a glitch in the Loom, the result of an inability to pinpoint his exact timeline and a bizarre mixup with his genetic structure, and suddenly he ended up with the kind of name that made Time Lords run screaming; really, it wasn't fair—, the one that he wasn't going to ever use if he could help it. Let's see, Poe, Poe, Poe… what was a good thing to say to him with regards to his identity? Just plain old "Doctor" probably wouldn't work— the man was a genius, he'd know it wasn't a name, just something to hide behind when nothing else would do.

Poe. Poe, specifically, when he was forty years, eight months and eleven days old… just before he went delirious for a day or so and kept ranting on about a…

"Reynolds," the Doctor said.

Reynolds, what went with Reynolds?

"Malcolm Reynolds," he said. "Hello!"

Poe opened his mouth.

What he was going to say would never be known. At that very moment, a full-sized Dalek hologram, perfect in every detail, appeared out of nowhere in a swirling cloud of violet and cyan, shrieked "EXTERMINATE" and started swivelling around madly, pointing its gun about in a seemingly random manner, unsure of which target to pursue.

The Doctor cursed in a language long dead and straightened up, taking a step towards the holographic semi-creature.

"Everyone, listen to me," he began.

Unfortunately, the screaming had started a few seconds beforehand, and he went unheard.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was trying desperately not to think and failing. Every time she began to succeed, considering nicer, less insidious things like jelly babies and Scotland, she proceeded to inevitably think about _why _she wasn't thinking, and then that cycled back to what she was trying not to think about— namely, things that could kill the Doctor. Lethal things. Horrible things.

_Dalek _things.

No, no, no, no, no. Jelly babies. Lollipops. Scotland. Happiness. Time travel. Daleks… _No._

She whimpered, and the comm burst into life. Her eyes snapped open as a very, very familiar— sweetly familiar— preciously familiar— voiced crackled over the hidden speakers.

_"Listen to me!"_

Screaming. But quiet screaming. Whimpers, now. Whines. Shivers.

_"Everyone, get back into the cubicles. Close the doors, if you can, and lock them. It'll be okay, just do it, right now."_

Rose inhaled. He was alive. He was breathing.

He was in danger. She knew that tone of voice.

She was failing— she was failing— she had failed.

_"Rose,"_ he said— murmured— whispered— breathed, and it was the most beautiful sound she had heard in her life. _"Rose, I know it's hard, but please, please, please try to resist it. I don't know if you can, but considering the circumstances, I think it's worth a try."_

"I'm trying," she whispered, voice choked.

_"I've seen how the holograms work, and Rose, they aren't real, but they're pretty close. If that Dalek shoots anyone, the projected energy field will do irreparable damage to the nervous system and… well, it won't be as relatively quick as a normal Dalek extermination, but it's still going to kill someone. I need you to try to shut it down."_

A tearless sob yanked itself from her throat. Please, God, no, not a Dalek, of all things. Anything but that.

He was going to die. He was already dead. He might as well be, and it was her fault again and he was going to die—

_"Rose, I'm scrambling the systems but they're deadlocking me out— this computer is too advanced for me to use the basic setting on, and I don't have time to experiment. I need you to kill this thing now."_

She gasped, exhaled, tried to calm herself down. She thought of singing— singing, a beautiful deadly howling song and she couldn't get rid of it but he could if he needed to, and golden light. For one terrifying, beautiful second, she felt that she could actually do this—

—and then she heard it.

The battle-cry, shrieked from mutated vocal cords that were half-machine.

The insidious, paralysing one-note death sentence of a Dalek weapon.

And finally, inevitably, the sudden, piercing scream of the man it struck.

_Thud._

And the comm went dead.

-BAD WOLF-

I has a cliffie. ^.^ OH NOES! THEY BE'S STEALIN MAH CLIFFIE!!

Anyway.

Well, it's been so long that I forgot what I was going to say down here! Crappit.

Anyway, thanks again to Novacancymind and all of you other people who make my life feel like I'm actually doing something with it. :) I love you all. Seriously. All of you.

Also, thanks to the wonderful and brilliant and otherwise awesome writer of the wonderful New!Who novel _Prisoner of the Daleks_. I had never been frightened of a New!Who Dalek, ever, until I started reading this. And now I can hear the pulse of a Dalek ship in the noises the fan is making. –shiver-

If any part of this is Staazula, I blame the time. It is currently 0110 and it is too hot right now. . Oh look, now it's 0111. I feel special. ^.^

Good night, my loves. :) I hope to update soon— this story is itching me again. :D

_Next time..._

_He was dead._

_He was dead and it was her fault._

_No, said something deep inside her, beneath all the layers of her personality, right at the glowing golden barrier to her mind she didn't want to think about; it was their fault._

_A deep, surging, overwhelming, devastating ocean of anger swept over her and her hands tightened, wrists pressing against their restraints to the point of pain. So she couldn't switch off the technology pulling her nightmares from her mind. Fine._

_If they wanted her nightmares, then they would have them._

_All of them._


	15. Amusement and Abduction, part V

Okay. So this is _so _not going to work, but I'm going to try, because I do love you all. So, even though it's not going to work, I am going to try _very _hard to update this every Saturday. If I can't manage that, I'll at least try to update _something _every Saturday, because my current update, err, pattern is so not fair to you all. So… yeah. I'm gonna try.

**Disclaimer:** Please, please, please don't make me go through this again…

SIAPNIAN: In case you hadn't noticed already, this chapter is a good bit longer than they usually are. Now, why is it always so hard for me to do that intentionally?

**Warning:** Having never suffered from Rose's particular species of nerve damage, I had to resort to running through some Google searches and, failing that, the odd guess. If anyone _has_ been through that sort of thing and knows that I got something wrong, please tell me and I'll fix it.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by the wonderful Emily D. again. ^_^

-BAD WOLF-

It is a commonly accepted rule that one does not make goddesses angry. When goddesses—or goddess-like beings, anyway—get angry, there tends to be a rather impressive amount of mayhem instantly following the emotion registering itself in said being's mind.

It is less commonly accepted, but no less true, that one does not make the human hosts of goddess-like beings angry either. Such a connection is rather difficult to break; nigh impossible, actually, and even if that much is managed there will inevitably be certain changes in the host's mind which _are _irreversible even if you are an extremely arrogant Time Lord.

Unfortunately, the Tel did not listen to the second and slightly less commonly accepted rule, and Rose Tyler, ex-host, was very angry indeed.

She could feel the pathways from her mind to the computer; she'd been able to since she'd been wired into it. What she had not previously noticed were the connections from the computer to her mind, and it was these links that she exploited now.

Ignoring any possible need for stealth,—really, why should she try to be quiet about things? Let them _know _why they were dying; surprise attacks were no fun, really—she threaded her will through the sketches of code tying her to the command centre, rewriting it, sending it back. Pinpoints of energy pricked in her mind, in the sense of semi-sight replacing the one she had now lost completely. Every Tel in the station had a chip letting the computer know where they were and what they were doing, and every one of those chips glowed in Rose's mind.

She smiled, and with barely a flicker of concentration she blazed.

_"What's she doing?" _she heard, dimly—both through her real ears, and through the recording the station was automatically making for the crisis.

_"She's taken control," _said the male Tel grimly. _"I'm trying to lock her out."_

_"Try harder."_

She felt her nerves begin to retract, the metal sliding out from its network under her skin. _No, _she thought to the computer; it paused, hesitated, and then pushed the wires back where they had been.

_"What now?" _inquired the female snappishly, as new alarms began to sound.

_"I don't understand,"_ said the other; _"I gave her more than the normal dose of sedative, just to be sure…"_

Sedative? Rose tested her body; it wouldn't move. Huh. That must be what they were talking about.

Her mind, however, was not as easily subdued. Another wave of commands came thoughtlessly from her shell, and she felt the energy drain as more nightmares were created for the Tel to die by.

_"Shut it down."_

_"But, _ver, _that will cut off the life support for the subjects—"_

_"I don't care. If _she _has a problem with it, then we can go renegade, but I am _not _dying over a whim!"_

Rose felt the power in her mind dimming. She pushed through the numbers, found the command attempting to cut her off, and backspaced it.

If she could move, she would have laughed.

_"We've lost control."_

The voice was calm. She might have admired that, had it not come from her enemy—from the creature, right at this second, she hated the most. _"Evacuate."_

Not bloody likely, Rose thought fiercely, and she centred her thoughts on the room she was in. Not all of the other Tel were dead, but she could pick off the stragglers later; the shuttles had been one of the first things she had thought to disconnect. Still, she wanted to be there when the things that had put her here, the things that had killed the Doctor, died.

She couldn't see the Dalek when it materialized, but she did hear the screams.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor, who remained very much alive despite all evidence to the contrary, was getting very, very nervous. He wasn't sure exactly what had happened, but he could guess, no matter how improbable it sounded; but if it was Rose, who knew what the mental difficulties of taking over an entire space station (or at least a good chunk of it) might do to her?

Even barring that, judging by the pixels on the screen nearest him, she was slaughtering every creature on the station. Surely that had to do something to her, emotionally…

No, he reminded himself. Not this Rose. She had come to this world with thousands of deaths on her conscience. She could kill more without a thought, as easily as he could himself.

That thought sent sickness twisting in his stomach; Rose was too light, too sweet, to be a killer… but Time was rarely kind to those trapped inside it. And he supposed, when he pulled back and viewed things with the mind of a soldier—the mind of the man who'd blown up Gallifrey to save the Universe—, she was being helpful.

He wondered suddenly why she had managed to take such complete control when a few seconds earlier she hadn't even managed to dissolve the imaginary Dalek; he felt that he knew the answer, but it couldn't be that. She still had her own Doctor, her own universe, and he was just… the replacement. It had to be a coincidence.

And yet…

"Reynolds!" came a hoarse cry from the floor, harsh from pain and fried synapses. _"Reynolds!"_

Oh, right… there was a reason he was still alive. The Doctor whipped around and glanced downwards, and saw one of the greatest literary minds ever to grace the Earth writhing on the ground in pain.

"Aw, Poe," he groaned. "Why'd you have to trip like that?"

Technically speaking, the author had not tripped; in the panic incited by the Dalek's arrival, he had stumbled—or been shoved—as he attempted to retreat. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it), the path he took as he staggered, trying to get his balance, led directly into the death ray that had been aimed for the Doctor. It hadn't been a real Dalek ray, but it had been deadly enough to kill the Time Lord; and although he was certainly not ungrateful to the man for saving his life, he sincerely wished that it hadn't been quite like that.

Oh well, he thought; the world wasn't going to fall apart because of his death, and at least he had managed to get _The Telltale Lungs _done before he went. Although the Doctor had been meaning to ask him about that title. Wouldn't a heart have been better?

Anyway. There were more important things at hand.

"Sorry, Poe," he said, and ran down the hall.

-BAD WOLF-

_Hah! See? Wasn't that brilliant?_

_Okay, okay, yes, it was a bit mean to Poe. But he'd died in my universe and he was the closest one and the one with the worst balance, so…_

_Oh, stop shouting at me! I need that Doctor breathing for a while longer, and I don't want him to have to regenerate just yet. Rose still needs him to get her back home; there's nobody else who can crack the Void at short notice. And I dread to think what she would do with the knowledge that she had ended up inadvertently killing _two _Doctors; she might think he was better off without her, and then where would we be?_

_Oh, fine. Sulk if you want to. But I'm still right._

-BAD WOLF-

Seven Tel left.

Rose inhaled, and three died—two by Jagrafess, the third by clockwork robot. Exhaled, and one more left the world at the hands of the Autons. The air was cold and delicious in her lungs, and she breathed in again; she would have smiled, if she had any control over muscles that weren't vital.

Three Tel.

A gas-mask zombie stepped out of a corner, pleasantly asked if the creature was its mother, and gave it a hug. Electricity crackled through the hologram's form, and the alien shrieked as it died.

Two Tel.

Cybermen stomped out of a closet and began shooting.

One Tel.

Fabricated Daleks broke through the walls.

The last blinking dot fluttered slightly and vanished in a brief jolt of static. Pleasure whirred through Rose-computer's circuits, and she sent her holograms to sleep with a caress of a thought.

Nothing more to do. The Tel were dead. The Doctor was avenged.

A question loomed uncomfortably in her mind—_Now what?_

-BAD WOLF-

The Time Lord, who really didn't need to be avenged but didn't mind the lack of resistance he was encountering, peered carefully around a corner.

_Cybermen._ He snapped back, breath jerking in his throat. Don't panic. Don't panic. You'll think of something, just don't panic.

The holograms turned and stomped along. Stopped in the hall. One of them turned its head to look at the Doctor's now-useless hiding place.

Hearts pounding, he darted around his corner as quickly as he could, ran behind the Cybermen, frantically looking for some kind of alcove or closet or _anything _that he could hide in until the holograms went away. Rose wouldn't kill him if she knew it was him standing there—but did she know? Could she see him? Was she even looking?

With a malevolent _clang_, one of the robotic forms turned, evidently alerted to his presence by the sound of his plimsolls against the tile. Panicking now (so much for the _Guide_, he thought irritably; but who, under these circumstances, could possibly follow the instructions printed in large, friendly letters on its cover?), he skidded into an about-face, eyes wide as he stared down what was almost certainly going to be his doom.

And he liked this regeneration so very much, too, he lamented. Nine snorted something derisive in the back of his head, but he wasn't listening. He rarely did.

The blank spaces that served for eyes started directly at him for a few seconds—and their owner calmly turned back around. The group of Cybermen promptly marched around the corner and out of sight.

So… either they couldn't see him, or they weren't programmed to kill him. That was a relief, at least.

The Gallifreyan equivalent of adrenalin did still shoot uncomfortably through his system when he saw the Dalek sitting in the elevator, though.

-BAD WOLF-

Lines of binary sketched across Rose's mind in place of thoughts—Primary objective: complete. The Doctor: avenged. The Tel: annihilated.

The cold line of mental text pleased her, but still there was that nagging, the little blinking line at the end of the last number, prompting—asking—bugging her; every moment it flickered back into view it resounded in her brain, a never-ending chorus of _what now, what now, what now?_

She repeatedly opened and shut the door to her room, letting the rhythmic pulses of motion focus her mind in some way. She couldn't move to tap anything with her fingers, so that was the best she could do.

There were other victims, she thought vaguely. The authors, the artists, the poets… all stolen, snatched from their timeframes, plugged into the computers, forced to sacrifice their imaginations to feed… to feed… what purpose?

Obediently, the computer answered her. _Station 539 is dedicated to being the best holographic resort in the galaxy_, it said. _Step into any one of our decks, choose your fantasy and our tame imagination artists will delight in bringing forth in semi-solid form whatever you might desire. It's fun, safe, and only_—

She snapped shut the connection, disgusted. "Tame imagination artists", indeed! She burned against the Tel and suddenly wished she'd left just one, just one to kill; oh well. It couldn't be helped now.

At least she knew what she was supposed to do now. A quick scan told her that although the Tel certainly had the ability to tap into the Vortex, the space station did not; she'd have to find the TARDIS, then, and… well… She'd flown her before. No idea how, but she knew that she had managed it. Surely she'd be able to figure it out again. Alternatively, one of the captured creatures might be able to tell her what all the little buttons and dials did. You never really knew.

At any rate, she had a job to do. First… find the ship. Easy; it was ridiculously hard to hide something like that, and even if the Tel had tried they couldn't very well get past their own _computer_. Their firewalls and whatnot might have worked against the sonic screwdriver (don't think about that, Rose, don't think about it), but with the station's brain working against them? No chance.

There she was, big and blue and boxy, fantastic and wonderful. Seventy-two floors down, high-security storage. She unlocked it.

She was just feeling rather triumphant and purposeful when another uncomfortable thought struck her—how was she to get there? She was wired into the computer. If she unhooked herself, she would be blind, and who knew what the other little filaments had done to less obvious nerves? Would she even be able to stand, let alone make it down there and into the TARDIS? The ship had some incredibly impressive medical equipment, but blind and uncoordinated…

…there was no way.

The blinking line was back, and this time it seemed there was very little she could do about it.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor turned the final corner and discovered, unexpectedly, that the door separating him from his companion was opening and closing repeatedly, almost absentmindedly. Normally, he wouldn't have thought twice about it, but as the door snapped shut almost as soon as it slid open, even he wouldn't be able to squeeze through.

He had a sneaking suspicion as to why, and acted on it.

"Rose?" he called, voice gentle—no need to startle her, she might accidentally send one of her holograms after him in self-defence—"Rose, can you hear me?"

The door froze, half-open. The steady whirring of the space station went quiet, and a light behind him flickered, as if in shock.

He was right, then.

"Rose," he continued, hesitantly, "can you open the door for me?"

_"Doctor?" _The voice was that of the computer, but the plaintive tone to the word was most definitely hers. He exhaled shakily, hands trembling just a little as he stepped forward.

"It's me," he informed her.

_"You're… y… v… kn…"_ The monotone stuttered, as if uncertain of exactly what it was trying to say. _"You're alright?"_

He swallowed. "Perfectly."

The lights dimmed, ever-so-slightly, as if relieved. The door slid open without a sound, and he half-ran inside.

His breath hitched when he saw her. He'd expected them to wire her up to something—well, how else could she have hacked into the computer to the point where she could channel her thoughts into the communications system?—but he honestly hadn't been expecting anything quite that… extreme. Lying on some kind of table-like structure, motionless, a million silver filaments around her glittering in the light like a halo—she looked ethereal, otherworldly.

Well, he thought guiltily, she _was _otherworldly. In a manner of speaking.

His eyes traced the tiny glinting wires hanging about her, saw where they entered her skin, nipping between her vertebrae to tap into her nerves. The Doctor winced, anger blooming in his stomach—the people who'd done this to her…

…were dead. Focus, Doctor.

"Okay," he said. "We need to get you back to the TARDIS. Can you—"

"Storage area three," the computerized monotone interrupted. "Seventy-two floors down, third left on the left-hand corridor. I unlocked it, if…" She trailed off, uncertain.

"—walk," he finished lamely.

"Oh." She thought for a moment. "I don't think so. Can't tell."

"Just have to carry you, then," he muttered. "Can you disconnect yourself or do I have to?"

Rose hesitated for a moment, as if still unconvinced she wasn't imagining things. Then, with infinite slowness, the filaments surrounding her began to move, to retreat.

The Doctor sighed in something akin to relief and stepped forward.

-BAD WOLF-

Dimly, though the bits of her skin that still knew how to feel things, she recognized that she was being moved. Carried, she supposed; she concentrated on the vague, patched sensations of fabric against her cheek, the faint idea of pressure against her shoulder-blades and the backs of her knees, and tried not to think about the searing pain that blazed spasmodically through her form. It felt like every nerve in her body had not only fallen asleep, but been ripped apart—which, she supposed, was probably very like what had happened.

She thought carefully and completely failed to move her fingers. This was bad, then. At least she was still breathing…

Fabric. Cheek. She started trying to memorise the pattern of the threads—anything but the fact that the electricity sparking along her nerves was only transmitting agony.

The creak of a door reached her ears. So they were at the TARDIS, then. Either that, or this was a _very _detailed delusion—a theory that she still wasn't ruling out. Not until she could see him standing in front of her.

She was shifted, the painful tingling marking where the Doctor supported her spreading to most of her back; so she was on a table, then, or something like one.

"Oh, Rose," he murmured to her, gently. "What have they done to you?"

She wanted desperately to answer, but try as she might all she could do was exhale; her vocal cords would not constrict for her. So she sat, and breathed, and waited.

A humming whirr moved over her prostrate form, and the Doctor hissed a breath through his teeth. A short, discordantly melodious word slipped past his lips. The TARDIS wouldn't translate it and the syllables were slightly removed from the snippets she had heard from her original Doctor, but the approximate meaning was clear enough. A small frisson of pleasure trickled through her; despite the fact that he would have been furious even if the injuries had been inflicted on a total stranger, there was something incredibly flattering about the idea that he would curse in his native tongue because of something that had happened to her, particularly.

She might as well enjoy _something _about this whole cursed business, after all.

-BAD WOLF-

The damage was severe—of course, he had been expecting that; just seeing her had allowed him to deduce that much. The wires had not merely been pushed into her brainstem, or even just the spinal column; instead, they had been meticulously (and unnecessarily) threaded through almost every nerve in Rose's body, tearing the soft interior tissue apart. The system had clearly not been built for humans, so the Tel had rigged it so it would simply not kill her, with no thought for the injuries they might cause. She didn't mean anything to them; she was just something to get rid of the immediate problem of the Doctor and subsequently be discarded.

He let loose another stream of insults, of the sort that could have gotten him exiled on Gallifrey. The TARDIS hummed in displeasure, but refrained from any further punishment; she was too furious to care about the Doctor's lapse into profanity. He spared her a curious glance; she'd never reacted like that with other companions. Well, she was inordinately fond of Sarah-Jane, but past that…

If she was this taken with the girl before him, the Tel were lucky to have died at Rose's hands. Well, thoughts. If the TARDIS had got hold of them…

Speaking of… He shook himself, forcing himself to focus on the task at hand. Considering the impressive amount of injuries his companions managed to get in their travels with him, he had long ago made sure to obtain and program some nanogenes to repair the damage; and it was these tiny, glowing robots he sent off into Rose's body with a prick of the dispenser. He stood back, watched anxiously as they traced themselves through her, replicating the destroyed cells. With every twitch of movement she made, even if it was in pain, he relaxed a little more; Rose Marion Tyler should never be still. She was so _alive_; motionlessness was somehow very, very wrong when it came to her…

Small thrills slid through his skeleton as the nanogenes reached her face, as her countenance finally shifted, assembling into a vague look of discomfort. Of course the process hurt; he'd been through it himself a few times, he knew. But just the fact that her beautiful, expressive face had _moved_ at last, that she was looking anything other than completely blank—it was glorious.

She rolled slightly from side to side, working out the cramps in her muscles. "Blimey," she muttered. "Couldn't you have at least given me some anaesthetic first?"

A smile quirked at his lips. Her eyelids slid open and for a long moment they simply took stock of each other, making sure they were both still alive and fully functional and everything was finally right with the world.

"Hello," he said, because the silence unnerved him.

"Hi." Her throat jerked as she remembered how to swallow. "You're alive, then."

He nodded. "I am."

She smiled, slowly, the expression starting in her eyes and suffusing inevitably, perfectly, over her beautiful—_beautiful?_ he asked himself, surprised at the attraction—countenance. Inevitably, the Time Lord's five billion languages seemed flat, insufficient, to describe the bright little human before him; even the oldest and most complicated form of his native tongue seemed somehow useless in the face of her joy.

He had seen a lot of things in his thousand-odd years of life, he thought, but Rose… Rose was _incredible._

And just like that, another Doctor slipped down the path his parallel had walked years before.

-BAD WOLF-

_Well, that makes things… difficult. I'd hoped the Doctor—_that _Doctor, that is—would come to his senses before… but I suppose that just goes under the whole "I'll never understand mortals" thing. Really, I never will. So illogical. I mean, yes, the Doctor and Rose—any Doctor and Rose, really—will inevitably start… doing that squishy-hearted thing those creatures love so much. But I would have thought even this Time Lord would have the sense to comprehend that Rose doesn't _belong _with him. And evidently I was wrong, of course, because this is the Doctor and he'll do what he wants, even if there's a universe—and more importantly, Rose's wishes—at stake. Which means I just have to try even harder to get the stupid man to stop fawning over her and take her home already._

_It would be a lot simpler if they weren't so frelling cute, though._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was resting, getting used to being able to move again; after the appropriate amount of yay-we're-still-alive hugging, the Doctor had left to begin the appallingly dull chore of memory-wiping and dropping off the various kidnapped artists. Rose didn't know why she had to stay put; she _felt _fine, if a little tingly, and couldn't she be useful somehow? But the Time Lord had insisted, and he'd pulled out the sweetly doe-eyed look she bitterly knew she could never resist. She had _hoped _he wouldn't find out her susceptibility to the aforementioned expression, at least not this early on; but he had, so here she sat, feeling bored and more than a little useless.

The TARDIS whirred in protest at the latter, and Rose instinctively ran her hand along the wall in simultaneous apology and comfort.

The door slid open. She turned, startled, to see the Doctor escorting a girl of about sixteen. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and wore a dress that bore a suspicious resemblance to Rose's—if slightly more worn. She looked exhausted and more than a little confused, and regarded her surroundings with that kind of quiet awe that generally accompanied first visits inside the timeship.

"Jane," the Time Lord said, quietly, "this is Rose. Rose," he added, a little more loudly and with one of his insufferable behold-my-awesomeness grins, "this is Miss Jane Austen."

The girl focussed on Rose for a moment and curtsied. Rose, feeling slightly awkward, attempted to mimic the gesture.

She wanted to say something denoting the superfluity of the Doctor's introduction, but her throat froze. _This _was _Austen._ _Jane Austen,_ as alive as anyone could possibly be, just _standing _there in front of her like… like… something that stood there in front of her like that. She had managed to get used to speaking with dead people, in her earlier travels with the Doctor; not having done that for a while, not having _expected _to do it ever again, she'd forgotten… It was like her first couple of adventures all over again.

Jane Austen. She'd just _met Jane Austen._ The thought swirled around her head, killed all other musings with its volume. After a brief struggle, she managed to find her voice, conscious of the fact that she probably should have said something. "Hi," she choked out, and promptly wanted to hit herself.

She noticed that the girl was still subtly studying her surroundings, even as she kept her eyes fixed on Rose. She gave a vague half-smile, clearly out of her depth but bearing it well. "Pleasure," she murmured.

The Doctor sensed his companion's discomfiture and flashed her a quick smile of reassurance. "Listen," he said. "I'd love to stay and chat, but there appear to be several dozen people down there who need to have their memories wiped and can't find their own way home, so I'll just…" He trailed off for a moment. "But I just thought, since Miss Austen here is kind of the reason we _came_ and we weren't planning on thwarting an alien plot today—sorry about that, Rose—I figured…" He fidgeted, fingers going up instinctively to ruffle his hair as he diligently looked everywhere but her.

Rose didn't know why he was so out of sorts, but she did know how to release him; she caught his gaze and gave him the most brilliant smile she could. He blinked for a moment, then seemed to relax, his hand dropping down to hang by his side. "'Kay," she told him. "Have fun."

He gave her a slightly sarcastic grin. "Oh, yes," he drawled. "Crawling around the heads of total strangers _is _one of my hobbies, you know."

There was an awkward moment in which no one spoke. Rose shifted uncomfortably under the Doctor's gaze; he seemed to snap into reality at the movement. He inhaled, blinked, and practically fled.

Baffled, the two humans he left stared after him. Rose wondered at his behaviour; he'd seemed almost _jumpy_, and while she'd seen this Doctor be many things in her short time with him, "jumpy" had never been one of them. Not like that.

She turned, shaking herself, and noticed with chagrin Jane giving her a look that was almost… appraising? It disturbed her, the polite scrutiny; she shifted nervously from one foot to the other. "S-so you write, then?" she asked, trying to keep the attention off of herself.

Jane gave a half-smile. "As I understand it, that's why those… creatures abducted me," she replied, seeming slightly amused.

Rose flushed, feeling suddenly very stupid—something she hadn't experienced since coming to this world. Since Reinette, actually—and, by reflex, almost distractedly, a faint tinge of bitterness stung her throat. "Right, yeah, sorry," she said, looking at the floor. She gave something which might have been a laugh. "Stupid of me. Sorry, I'm just a bit… out of practise."

Jane's eyebrows rose. "This is normal for you and the Doctor?" Her voice was lightly incredulous.

She hesitated. "Sort of. Mind, I didn't used to be with him, not this one, but…" She trailed off, unsure of what, exactly, she was saying. She must look like an idiot right now…

The appraising look was back, along with a curiosity so fierce it was almost palpable; but Jane held herself back, folded her hands together as she clearly resisted the urge to question further.

Suddenly, she didn't seem to intimidating. She couldn't have been more than sixteen, and she was clearly out of her depth, but she was trying. And if she wanted to know about the Doctor…s, if that would distract her from what she'd just experienced… The girl had been _kidnapped_ and hooked up to a device she never should have even known existed; surely she was in need of some kind of diversion. Such events were disturbing enough for Rose, and she at least knew what was going on…

She gave her a grin. "Long story. If you really want to hear it."

Jane looked startled, then embarrassed. "Miss Tyler, I don't mean to pry—"

She waved a hand about, interrupting her. "For one thing, call me Rose. For another, I don't mind. It's just… a bit complicated. To say the least."

The girl gave her a wan smile. "Rose, I was just stolen in my sleep by creatures the Doctor tells me are from an entirely different world. I'm fairly sure I can grasp almost anything else."

Rose chuckled. "Got me there," she admitted. "And considering how some of your plots are laid out, anything I'd be able to throw at you'd be nothing, wouldn't it?"

Jane smiled a bit at that, and though she was doing a surprisingly good job of hiding it, the older woman could tell she was absolutely burning to understand her interactions with the Time Lord.

So she told her, trying to make it as simplistic and succinct as possible; no use confusing the girl even more, and even then it was just the backstory to the question she really wanted answered, in the end. She was surprised and not a little pleased to know that her synopsis of the events on Bad Wolf Bay did not affect her as much as they once would have. She did have some difficulty, having to pause to swallow the jagged lump in her throat; in an unexpected gesture, Jane reached out and placed a comforting hand on Rose's arm.

"If you don't… wish to tell me," she said hesitantly, "I don't require it. I don't need to know if it makes you uncomfortable."

"No," Rose replied instantly. "No, I want to tell you."

She looked slightly sceptical, but allowed her to finish without interruption.

"And that's it," she said eventually, somewhat lamely she thought.

The girl seemed to weigh this in her mind for a few moments. "So you and the Doctor are not… courting in some fashion?" She sounded slightly dubious of that, but if she was, she didn't voice it.

Rose stuttered for a moment. "No!" she said. "No." She swallowed. "I mean, he's… but…" She huffed, annoyed with herself.

Jane blinked at her kindly. "You still love your first Doctor."

She nodded miserably. "And it's not like… They're not identical. I can't just replace one with the other, because they're… Every time I look at him, all I know is that he's not the same."

The writer laid her hand on Rose's arm again and squeezed it gently, comfortingly. "I think I comprehend you," she said. "I'm sorry."

The time traveller gave her a slightly wavering smile. "Nah, it's alright." She paused. "Thanks for listening. I know I'm not the greatest storyteller, especially compared to…" She wagged a hand up and down, indicating Jane as a whole.

She shook her head vehemently. "Nonsense," she said. "You aren't as dull as you think. And thank you for telling me. I know it can't have been easy for you."

"It's fine," she said amiably. "It was nice." She chuckled slightly. "I don't get to tell that story to a lot of people. 'S good, not having to pretend."

A slightly baffled look. "Whyever would you have to pretend?"

She grinned. "Believe it or not, Jane—erm, Miss Austen—"

Jane smirked. "You specifically requested I call you by your Christian name," she said dryly. "It's only fair that I allow you to do the same."

Rose brightened. "Alright then, Jane," she said. "Believe it or not, but not everyone reacts to that as well as you just did."

The girl's smile widened. "Then they are fools," she replied, sounding ever-so-slightly smug.

"Probably." A slightly hysterical giggle left Rose's lips; it was answered by a chuckle from Jane; and in short order the two were laughing at nothing, the stress of the past day releasing into a cloudburst of mirth.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor dropped Poe off last; after several failed attempts to save the man's life, the timeline finally solidified with his death in consideration, and he reluctantly gave up. The pattern of the scorch-marks in his clothing would have looked suspicious, so he found something relatively inconspicuous in the TARDIS wardrobe and helped the delirious man into the outfit; after that, all there was left to do was stick him in Baltimore and let him be. After that unpleasant business was over, he set off to find his companion and the singular remaining displaced artist.

He wasn't precisely sure what he expected to see and hear when he turned the last corner in the path leading to his companion, but as soon as he heard her laughter intermingling with the young author's, the very thought of any other behaviour from her sounded ridiculous. It was so _Rose_, that levity, that _life_; of course she would be laughing.

He stayed in the shadows for a few seconds, allowing himself to drink in the sight of her; the tangled timelines dancing about her form shone in the light of her joy, and for a staggering moment she _burned_—a sun in human form, all beauty and warmth. He couldn't bear to interrupt, so he stood back and let himself bask in his companion's happiness.

Jane turned her head, giggling lightly at Rassilon knew what, and her eyes finally focussed on him. Instinctively, he shrank back, reluctant to intrude—_him_, considering walking into one of the rooms on his own _ship _an intrusion? But he'd managed to startle the girl enough that she didn't see his hesitation, and she burst out with his title, surprised.

Rose whipped around, eyes glittering with delight, and—bafflingly—blushed. What did she have to be embarrassed about? It wasn't as if they were talking about him.

…was it?

He swallowed, uncomfortable. "Um," he said. "Just… just dropped off the last of them." He got the intense feeling he should say something else, but his vocabulary appeared to have stayed in the console room.

His companion recovered, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. It settled there, curving enticingly as it traced a path along her neck. Unbidden, his gaze followed that path far past where the golden strands ended—just to the side of her trachea, caressing one of her clavicles before shifting right, to the hollow between her collarbones. If he just barely pressed his fingertips there, he would detect her pulse thrumming whisper-soft against his skin, feel—

_No._ She wasn't his. He consciously moved his eyes away from her, to see Jane giving him a look that could only be described as "knowing". Unnerved and unbalanced, he cleared his throat unnecessarily.

"So, Miss Austen—"

"Please, call me Jane."

His eyebrows went up a bit at that. "Well, then, Jane," he corrected himself, quirking a smile. "We just need to clear your memory up a bit, and we can take you home."

Alarmed, the girl looked to Rose, who looked at him with a horrible kind of resignation. "You need to make her forget what's happened," she stated.

He inhaled, forced himself to look her in the eye. "Yeah," he answered. "'Fraid so. Well, she probably wouldn't _want _to remember." He shrugged.

"But—" She shifted, worrying her lower lip between her teeth for a moment in a way the Doctor should not have found distracting. "Does that mean… she'll have to forget about us?"

He had trouble refusing Rose at the best of times, he had learned. In the fact of her obvious distress, though, it was absolutely impossible. "No," he said instantly. "No, I can figure something out. She doesn't have to forget you."

Rose visibly relaxed. Jane, on the other hand, did not. "What do you mean?" she asked nervously. "What do I have to forget?"

The Doctor turned to face her. "We just need to make sure you don't remember anything that could influence the timeline," he told her. "Nothing too complicated." He smiled. "No need to worry about it, really. I'm very good."

Rose rolled her eyes at that and smirked. That seemed to reassure the teenager more than anything else could have, and she hesitantly nodded.

"Good," he murmured, and stepped forward.

-BAD WOLF-

_He had felt the minds of more geniuses today than he had in the last two or three hundred years, but even with all that, delving into Jane's mind was a bit of a shock. Even at this age, even without her talent fully developed, she was… she was so amazing._

_She recoiled when his consciousness first touched hers, as he'd expected she might; he soothed her with a brush of thought as best as he could, metaphysically standing back until she got used to his presence. She did so in surprisingly short order, overcoming her fear and confusion to curiously push against his mind, instinctively recognising the two-way nature of this particular breed of telepathy and using that to her advantage. He shut all the more dangerous parts of himself behind very large and very impenetrable doors, but otherwise let her wander at will; he could always erase anything important, and the distraction might prove useful, should her unusual tranquillity dissolve as soon as her memory started to change. Considering the way she'd acted up to now, he rather doubted her composure would be shifted by something so small as a little mental editing, but you could never be sure with humans._

_She didn't even flinch when he started the process, and a flash of pride ran through him; she seemed to smile at that before continuing her analysis of his emotional centres. The target of her scrutiny amused him somewhat, although he worried slightly at what she might think of some of the darker feelings that habitually swirled there. He'd got better recently, for some reason, but that didn't mean that he was all happiness and fluffy bunnies all the time._

Jane audibly snickered at that, and he grinned. Allowing himself to be distracted for a moment, he noted that Rose was staring at them and doing that thing with her bottom lip again.

_Light flashed across his mind, mental laughter that wasn't his, and a wordless thought accused him of all kinds of unusual and totally unacceptable attractions towards his companion. He instantly denied it, of course, which just caused the girl to giggle again. She was quiet for a moment, and he wondered what in Rassilon's name she was doing just before a rapid stream of conflicting emotions raged through him, almost too quickly to be categorised—the contentment he'd felt before he'd discovered Jane was missing, the desperation when Rose was captured, the rage at what had been done to her, the exquisitely intense relief when she'd smiled at him again, and—embarrassingly—the fascination that had come over him a scant few minutes before._

"That's—" His voice was rough. He swallowed. "That's cheating."

"I hardly think so," Jane replied, amused. "It would be better to say that it's your own fault for allowing such feelings to exist in the first place."

_You can't tell her, he said without words. Promise me you won't._

_She tried to hide it, but the tone of her mind was insulted that he could even think she'd betray him so._

_Relieved, he left her to her nosiness (a term she took particular offence to, as soon as she'd leeched its meaning from his head) and continued with his work._

A sigh left Jane's lips and, abruptly, she collapsed. The Doctor had been expecting that, as he'd been the one to put her to sleep in the first place, and caught her easily before she hit the ground. "There we are," he murmured unnecessarily.

"Is she alright?" Rose asked, worried.

He grinned at her. "She's fine. Just needed her unconscious to make our story a bit more convincing, and to give her mind a rest." Picking up the unconscious girl, he continued. "And I made sure she remembers you. Just altered the background events a bit, so the TARDIS is safely forgotten."

A smile burst across his companion's face, and a supernova could not have been move beautiful.

-BAD WOLF-

When Jane awoke, she was confused. She knew she was on a couch, and from the ambient sounds she guessed she was home; but past that, she couldn't recall much beyond vague scraps of conversation that didn't make sense. She'd run in with a couple of people—the Doctor and Rose, her memory supplied—when she was… was… She must have been out walking. Nothing else made sense. She'd been out walking, she'd talked to Rose and the Doctor, she'd… she'd…

"Jane?" asked a voice tentatively—that was Rose, she could recall that much. She shifted, squinting against the light that patiently tried to stab through her skull. She swallowed, feeling ridiculously thirsty.

"What happened?" she inquired, shielding her eyes and trying to sit up.

"Sun got to you," Rose answered, smiling softly at you. "Gave us a bit of a scare, you did, but you'll be alright." She half-turned, focussing on something just out of Jane's vision. "Doctor, she's waking up."

Jane's eyes adjusted to the light, and she sat up, blinking, as the Doctor came into view.

He grinned at her. "Hello," he said. "How are you feeling?"

She thought about this for a moment. "Well enough," she decided.

"Good. That's…" He nodded pointlessly for a few seconds. "That's good." After a moment of hesitation, he glanced at Rose. "Well, Rose Marion Tyler," he said, pronouncing each syllable with unnecessary emphasis, "soon as you're ready, we can go."

The woman smiled at him, and Jane didn't miss the fact that his countenance brightened slightly at the expression. "Alright," his companion said. "Just give me a couple of minutes, okay?"

He nodded. "Right. Will do. I'll just go and… make sure our… transportation is ready." He flashed Jane a quick smile. "Nice meeting you, Miss Austen."

She stared up at them. "You're leaving? Already?"

Rose shifted uncomfortably. "Well, we can… we can come back later, maybe, yeah?" For confirmation, she glanced at the Doctor, who nodded. She turned back to Jane. "So this isn't the _last _time you'll see us. We just… live a bit off, so we won't be able to turn up as much as we'd like."

The girl thought about proposing some kind of correspondence, but something stopped her. She tried to remember why and found she couldn't, and that the longer she thought about it the harder it was to hold on to the idea; so she eventually let it go.

As soon as the Doctor left the room, a look of earnestness came over Rose's face. "Listen," she said. "Can you remember when you were talking to the Doctor?"

She nodded. "Yes. I can't recall the words used, but…"

That seemed to amuse her for some reason. "Yeah, I can imagine," she chuckled slightly. "Anyway, there was one bit I couldn't help overhearing, where you said something about… it being his own fault for… something? I mean, I don't want to be nosy or anything, I'm just curious. It didn't make sense."

Jane smiled at her. "I'm sorry, but that's something the Doctor will have to tell you himself. He made me promise my silence on the subject."

Rose huffed in mild annoyance, but seemed otherwise accepting. "Alright," she said. "Still. Had to try." She grinned. "I'll be off, then," she said.

The teenager found herself becoming more and more bemused by the fact that she was actually comprehending the woman's method of speech. By all accounts, she should be totally baffled, but… somehow she knew. She vaguely wondered why that was, and thought she heard a faint chuckle in the back of her mind. She questioned that as well, but once again had the intense urge not to think about it. "When can I expect to see you again?" she asked, instead.

Rose exhaled. "I dunno," she said. "I'll try and get the Doctor to bring me back as soon as possible, but I really dunno." She chuckled slightly. "And even if I got him to bring me back tomorrow, might be years before we actually got here, so no promises."

Very little of that statement made sense. It annoyed her.

"But, umm. It was nice talking," she finished, eyes wide with something that looked suspiciously like… admiration?

"Likewise," Jane said, smiling. Rose returned the expression, if slightly manically, and left the room.

There was, of course, the necessary bustle of her family getting used to the idea that she was perfectly healthy and uninjured; Jane found herself ignoring that for the most part, dwelling with more contentment on the Doctor and Rose, and their relative tangle of emotions. She had long made a hobby of observing people and their interactions, but she had never met a pair more confused about each other than those two; she smirked slightly, remembering the man's discomfiture upon being forced to recognise the feelings that were starting to form in him. Perhaps, she thought, she should incorporate those two in a story someday—but not named as they were; that would be far too obvious, and might stray perilously close to betraying the Doctor's confidence. He, she decided, would be a soldier—she recalled some mention of a war—; and Rose… what had the Doctor called her? Rose…

Marianne.

The young author smiled, so lost in her thoughts that the farewell roar of the dematerialising TARDIS didn't reach her ears.

-BAD WOLF-

Okay. I know I haven't updated this in a long time, and I know I am evil. I hope you have been placated by the length of this chapter, although I swear it was supposed to only be 3,000 words. –suspicious look at muse-

Secondly, I must hug TCASM now. –does so- Do you know why? Because she sent me the link to The Way of Things. You know, the epically awesome DW/Blackpool crossover. I have two things to say about this. 1. OMGSQUEE!!!11one 2. That story is an inspiration. Truly, it is. I can only hope to be even _half _so shiny with this fic and its accompanying 'verse.

Yes, Alternatively has grown to the point where not only will there be at least one sequel, but an entire 'verse. I'll have to set up an LJ or something for it eventually. This thing is SCARY-HUGE now, ladies, gentlemen and assorted folk of unspecified gender. Be afraid!

Also, I'm in the Support Stacie April Author Auction, which takes place in March for some reason. Details should be on my profile, unless still hates my guts. :)

Be well, hope you liked (I'm not a history person, I'm afraid, so I'm not very confident about this episode), and I'll see you next Saturday with the opening chapter of… -drumroll- THE FIRST TWO-PARTER!!! :D


	16. Floodplain, part I

Okay, so it's not quite Saturday. But I wrote the first draft of this chapter very late at night with a vicious head cold; by the time I'd finished, BOTH my betas were asleep, and I figured it would be better to have it a bit late than extremely nonsensical. But I'm doing better than I normally do, if that means anything…

**Disclaimer: **Negative.

SIAPNIAN: As compensation for the shortness of this chapter, I'm going to attempt to update SC in the near future. I'm hoping for tomorrow-ish. And because I'm sick and I like happy fluffy whatnots when I'm sick… FLUFF! :D

**WARNING:** I have a head cold. My thought processes are… not quite working right.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by Emily D. again, who now has a username. Last time I checked, she was YourCaptJack. :)

-BAD WOLF-

"Can I go home?"

Instinctively, the Time Lord to whom the inquiry was addressed attempted to jerk upright. Unfortunately, he forgot that he had been curled up under the console and there was therefore no possible way of sitting up without pain involved; after a moment, though, her exact words sank in and the physical discomfort of bashing his head against the grating seemed to melt away into nothing.

"Home?" he asked, voice cracking slightly, entire being suddenly flooded with panic. After only a few adventures, she wanted to _leave?_ What had he done? What was wrong? Was it the fact that he was so very much like her old Doctor but wasn't him? Had she, he wondered with growing dread, been particularly attached to those chocolates?

She seemed to sense his distress. "Oh! Just for a bit," she clarified, soothingly. "I just want to visit my mum for a bit is all. Kind of promised." Peering up from his place beneath the console, he could see her trainers move as she shifted uncomfortably.

He let himself breathe, wondering for a moment why he had reacted so strongly to the idea of her departure; sure, he'd been alone for a long time before her and there was something oddly compelling about the woman, but it wasn't as if he'd never been left behind before. After less time than that, even.

An answer tentatively offered itself and he shoved it away. Nonsensical, he told himself, and didn't quite believe it.

He started to disentangle himself from the grating. "You want to go home," he said, "to visit your mum."

The Doctor wasn't even looking at her and he knew the precise smirk that took over her face. "Yes," she said patiently. "Contrary to popular belief, I wasn't going to just leave her behind once I started travelling with you."

He finally managed to stand up and looked at her, ruffling his hair absently. "Right," he said, because he felt like he should say something but didn't know what it was.

She grimaced. "Sorry, probably should have said… Other you freaked out a bit too when I phrased it like that."

Bafflingly, a flash of bitterness took over his mind at the comparison to his parallel, and he mentally shook himself and turned to the console.

"Any particular time period she's expecting you in?" he asked as he started to play with the coordinates.

"I dunno. Maybe a week after I left?" She gave him a startling grin. "But don't try to put that in and end up with a decade or so in the future, yeah?"

He shot her a brief glare. "It's not my fault that the temporal sat-nav doesn't work," he grumbled.

"Right." Her tongue slipped between her teeth as she smiled, and he forgot every irritation he felt at her lack of belief in his piloting skills.

There was semi-awkward silence for a few moments; eventually, they seemed to come to some kind of conclusion, and she made her way over to the jumpseat and sat in it cross-legged, watching him as he manipulated the timeship.

"Oh," she said, just as he was starting to feel uncomfortable about her scrutiny. "She says she'd like to meet you. This you, anyway."

His hands stilled on the controls. Horrified, his eyes flew to hers. "No."

She rolled her eyes at him and sat back in the chair. "You haven't even _met_ her yet," she accused.

"No," he allowed, "but that doesn't mean she isn't still…" 'Intimidating' was the word that sprung immediately to mind, but his pride wouldn't let him use it. "I've heard… things. About what she can do. And besides, it's not something I do, visiting companions' mothers." He shook his head vehemently.

She sighed. "Doctor," she said, voice soft and somehow simultaneously pleading and annoyed, "she's not going to slap you or anything, she just wants to meet you."

"Well, hasn't she already?" Time Lords did not whine. "I mean, other me?"

Rose was using the puppy eyes on him again and he felt himself wavering; he swiftly checked his thoughts for any evidence of telepathic influence and found none. Sneaky, she was.

"It's not the same," she told him sincerely. "You're not him."

Something between his hearts brightened and he fought the urge to say "really?" with a pathetic sort of grin on his face.

"Just a few minutes?" she pleaded. "Maybe half an hour? You don't even have to talk much if you don't want to after the first couple of minutes."

He hated himself for it, but he wavered.

"Please?" She blinked sweetly. Was she…? She was! She was using her eyelashes against him! That was… that was cheating…

The last of the Time Lords managed to resist Rose Tyler's eyelid-fluttering for a grand total of six point two eight three seconds before his will crumbled. "Fine," he muttered, and pulled the final lever to send the TARDIS into flight.

She gave him a positively brilliant smile. As soon as the timeship came to a stop, she bounced off the seat and ran up to him.

Of all the things she could have done, the one he had expected the least was what she actually did; as soon as she got within hugging distance (which was what he naturally assumed was going to happen), she forewent the predicted embrace—instead, she got on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his cheek, lightning-fast, before pulling away.

The Doctor's brain was a truly amazing thing, fully capable of thinking coherently in six dimensions while its owner was thoroughly asleep, commonly having several thousand independent ideas in a few minutes. It is therefore a testament to the nature of his companion's unexpected gesture of thanks that, in that moment her mouth met his skin, every single synapse fell silent.

He stood, slightly dazed, and stared at her. She jerked back from him as quickly as she'd approached, cheeks darkening, unable to look at him, clearly distressed. For a few moments, she opened her mouth as if to say something; but evidently she thought better of it, instead darting over to the door as if she couldn't get away quickly enough. The Time Lord, in turn, made his own retreat—circling to the other side of the console, trying to force his heartsbeat back to a normal rhythm.

The door creaked open, unseen. "Um, Doctor?" Rose inquired, after an extremely uncomfortable moment of semi-silence.

"Yes?" he replied, trying not to sound distracted and failing. He could still feel her lips against his skin, suddenly hypersensitive to the precise shape and texture and—

"Are you sure you landed in the right century?"

"Yes," he managed to say. "Why?"

"Your ship appears to be flooding."

-BAD WOLF-

Insert theme music here! :D

Note to self: Don't eat five oranges in twelve hours. It will hurt.

So, yeah. Woohoo! And I'm in the Support Stacie auction, in case you missed it all those other times I said it. :)


	17. Floodplain, part II

So I figured out what I did wrong last chapter (well, wrong regarding the update): I decided to try and write the entire thing _on _Saturday. Clearly, this did not work. So it is currently Wednesday and I'm starting to work on it; we'll see how this does, and go from there. Alright? Bear with me; I'm not used to updating on time. Clearly. :P

**Disclaimer: **Own this I do not. Baffling sentence structure: has I it.

SIAPNIAN: And… that failed. It is now Saturday and the only thing I have completed on this entire document is the A/N. Epic fail. But at least I'm starting to work on it at 4.19 and not 11.00 this time… later And now it's Sunday at 6.58 and the blasted thing is _still not finished._ Insert curse word of your choice here. I'm so sorry about all this, really.

**Non-Warning (Rassilon, these author's notes are kind of long, aren't they?):** Betaed by Aelita Madeline.

-BAD WOLF-

_Damn it, Rose, I look away for two seconds and then you run off and start acting like he's your original Doctor?? ARGH!!_

_Sigh. Okay. I get that he looks just like him, I get that he acts pretty much the same a lot of the time, but that doesn't mean you get to start running around snogging him. Okay, so it was just the cheek, but that's not the point._

_As if it wasn't hard enough trying to convince the stupid Time Lord to let her go, she had to go and do that. She just _had _to._

_I suppose when it comes to her I might still be able to use that to my advantage, but the Doctor… is… probably going to be even more stubborn now._

_This is getting annoying._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was actually surprised and delighted by the sizeable amount of water outside (and, since she hadn't been able to close the door quickly enough, inside) the TARDIS. Under normal circumstances, the Doctor's penchant for "accidentally" missing the mark when she asked to visit her mother would make such an event almost mundane. However, the slip in her resolve not to treat this Doctor as she had the original had made her naturally assume that there would be no respite, no danger to distract her from the uncomfortableness of it all. She'd discovered this cessation of alien invasions upon the introduction of awkwardness shortly after the Reinette incident, whereupon they had gone a full week without once expecting death. More than once, she'd wondered if this wasn't the TARDIS's way of trying to get them to relax, taking them only to places where absolutely nothing was going wrong; but she'd never been able to explain to the ship that it only made things worse. She'd been _relieved _when the Cybermen showed up.

She was most gratified to find out that this TARDIS did not seem to have the same opinion regarding what would help her occupants get over whatever was troubling their relationship. Rose could, therefore, safely shove her lapse into the back of her mind for the time being, where her subconscious could process it and hopefully figure out what to do about it after they'd saved the world. It did _look _like Earth—there were several things suspiciously tree-shaped hanging about, after all, and what looked to be buildings off in the distance—so she could say with absolute certainty that this was Not Normal.

The probability of mortal danger could not have come at a more opportune time, and Rose probably would have hugged the timeship had she not have had to subsequently explain this to the Doctor. Which she would rather not have done.

"She's _what?_" demanded the Time Lord, snapping her abruptly out of her inner monologue. She should stop that, really; it was another habit he'd instilled in her, and a somewhat annoying one at that.

"Well, I dunno what you did wrong, but there's a load of water out there," she replied, turning. She noted that he was mostly behind the console, having just poked his head round to stare incredulously at her, and she was rather happy that this gave her an excuse to look at the controls and not him.

"What _I _did wrong?"

She studied the grating with infinite care as she stepped back up the ramp and to his side. "Well, you're the one piloting," she pointed out.

He made a mildly affronted noise at that, although she couldn't have said why, and spun the scanner around to look at it. After doing something vaguely incomprehensible to the device, the screen's calmly blank background suddenly became filled with Gallifreyan symbols that whirled and connected to each other in new and interesting manners.

How he could read that stuff, she'd no idea. "What's it say?"

She could hear the frown in his voice as he answered. "It says we're right where we're supposed to be," he said. "Exactly where I told her to land. We aren't off by an _inch_."

Rose blinked, both at what he had implied and the fact that the TARDIS had actually managed to follow his instructions that precisely (her mind filled with the blinding sensation of being glared at as soon as that particular thought appeared). "So why's there a flood outside?" she asked, ignoring the timeship's displeasure at her impertinence.

He inhaled, one hand reaching up to play with the hair at the nape of his neck. "I dunno," he replied. "Something's gone wrong, but… I couldn't say what. Or why." She could see him looking at her out of the corner of her eye, but couldn't quite bear to return the gaze just yet.

"Fantastic," she said, and meant it. Fractured timelines, after all, were much simpler than her own stupid emotions any day.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor hadn't particularly _wanted _to go to Torchwood, especially considering that the entire organisation had initially been formed with him as its main enemy (sort of), but Rose was very persuasive. Actually, "persuasive" was a bit of a misnomer for what she had actually done; she'd said they should go to Torchwood, he'd objected and asked why, she had replied that they might have found something out already and wouldn't that be easier than having to start from scratch? And he hadn't been able to argue with that, so he gave in.

The fact that she hadn't made eye contact with him once since the rather unexpected mouth/cheek incident probably helped as well. It unsettled him, and—although he wouldn't admit it in so many words—he was desperate even to have her look at him again. Even if she was very clearly comparing him to her original Doctor, even if he was falling short in that comparison, even if she was disturbed at his very _existence_, it would be better than this… this… perpetual refusal to shift her gaze anywhere near him.

But that entire train of thought discomforted him, so he tended to stay away from it. Which meant he had to stop questioning why he was trying to land the TARDIS in Torchwood—

"Don't try and land inside," Rose told him, after he'd already set the coordinates. "They've got this anti-teleportation field, no telling where we'd end up if they didn't take it down for us."

—why he was trying to land the TARDIS on top of Torchwood, and just get on with it.

The Doctor, being an evasive creature by nature, got on with it very well. The TARDIS materialised with a shuddering _thunk_ kind of noise (that was odd; he should probably look into that); he followed Rose out of it, all the while taking care not to look at her and notice that she wasn't looking at him.

The roof wasn't a particularly exciting place, all things considered. It was… there, and it was rather rooflike. There were a couple of people with guns who looked to be guarding an elevator-like structure, and surprisingly didn't point the aforementioned weapons at them. Either they recognised Rose or they were actually following through on their promise not to try to kill him after that whole him-saving-the-galaxy-from-their-stupidity thing.

"Hi, Stacey," his companion addressed one of the gun-bearing people.

"Hello," Stacey replied. She was actually rather pretty, by human standards, but the Doctor couldn't get past the fact that she reminded him intently of a mouse. The hair colour and the pervasive air of nervousness didn't help, of course.

There was uncomfortable silence for a few moments, and he stuck his hands in his pockets.

"Um," said Rose. "Are you going to let us in?"

Stacey shook her head meekly. "We can't," she said. "They deactivated your clearance after you left, and… well…" She shifted apologetically.

Rose winced. "Ah," she said.

The Doctor frowned. "What do you mean, deactivated her clearance? She's only been gone a week."

Stacey looked confused. "She's been gone for almost two months."

His companion turned to look at him triumphantly, and he inwardly cheered at the return of ocular contact. "So what was that about not being off by an inch, then?" she inquired sweetly.

"She wasn't!" he objected, then thought for a moment. "Wait, when did you start travelling with me?"

She quirked an amused eyebrow at him before glancing away, skittishly tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "February," she said. "The twenty-second, I think. Maybe."

"Not April?"

"No."

He swallowed. "Ah."

She snorted in a vague kind of derisive amusement.

"Besides," Stacey added as soon as silence returned, "it's not so much how long she was gone as that she left at all. She'd… basically joined a different organisation, and…" She seemed to notice the fact that there were two pairs of eyes on her, and trailed off hesitantly.

"And me being the reason Torchwood is even here isn't going to do anything, I suppose?" he inquired, fully expecting a negative answer.

He got one; Stacey shook her head and Rose spoke.

"In a way, that makes things worse," she told him. "My dad, he knows he can trust you, but there are still a lot of people here who don't."

"Sorry," Stacey apologised.

The Doctor nodded. "So are we going to do this on our own now?" he asked hopefully. "Wander around aimlessly for a bit, see what tries to kill us?"

Rose smiled at that. "Nah," she replied. "There's still one more thing I can try. Listen, can the TARDIS hover?"

-BAD WOLF-

Whatever Pete Tyler had been expecting at two in the afternoon on that particular day, it certainly hadn't been a knock at his office window. Especially not considering that that office window was a rather fatal distance above the ground, and the windows were not being cleaned. This being Torchwood (and, more importantly, this being the Doctor), though, that was exactly what happened.

He turned, startled, to see the TARDIS floating exasperatedly outside. One door was open and his daughter was standing in the gap, holding on to the timeship with one hand and tapping on the glass with the other. As soon as she saw she was noticed, she grinned.

"Can you let us in?" she said, voice muffled somewhat by the barrier.

He nodded, still slightly baffled at this turn of events, and got up to open the window and stand back to allow her entrance.

"I had actually hoped," Rose said, awkwardly clambering inside while completely ignoring Pete's offer for help, "that you'd lower the teleportation field—ow!" The last, of course, was not actually a relevant part of the conversation; rather, it had been a reaction to the fact that she had just thwacked her head against the window-frame.

"You alright, Rose?" came a worried voice from inside the TARDIS.

"I'm fine," she shouted back at him. "Just keep her still, alright?"

There was a faint grumbling from inside the ship, but Pete couldn't quite make it out. Since Rose seemed determined not to accept help in her quest to enter the room, he decided to make himself useful by phoning to have the teleportation field temporarily taken down. His daughter, meanwhile, managed to get all the way inside his office and stood triumphantly. The TARDIS wove about in the sky a little bit, as if disoriented.

There was a momentary, barely-visible flicker of semi-light outside the building, and one of the many and varied humming noises that frequented Torchwood stopped accordingly.

He glanced up. "Your ship can come in now," he informed her.

"Great," she replied, and turned back to the window. "Doctor, did you hear that?"

"Yes," came a faintly annoyed voice from inside. "I don't suppose you could close the door? I'm kind of trying to keep from crashing."

"Oh," Rose said, sounding slightly disconcerted. "Right. Sorry." Awkwardly, she reached outside and managed to tug the door shut. There was a muffled _boom_ and the TARDIS wheezed, fading away in time with its howl.

She turned to Pete. "Hi," she said, as the timeship started to reappear in the corner.

"Hi," he replied, and shifted. "Your mother's going to be furious, you know," he added.

She smirked. "The Doctor's not very good with bringing me back on time," she said. "She's probably used to it by now."

"Even so, you remember what happened last time you were away for this long…"

Rose had the decency to look embarrassed. "I didn't know that it was going to do that," she mumbled.

He laughed and was preparing to tease her more when the TARDIS door swung open.

"Please," the Doctor said as he entered the room, "can we not do that to her again unless it's _absolutely_ necessary? She's yelling at me, says she's sprained her kitchen. Oh, hello," he added, seeming to finally notice Pete.

"Doctor," he acknowledged. He saw, interestingly enough, that although the Time Lord's eyes were turned towards him, he seemed to really be studying his daughter. She seemed slightly flustered, off-put by the Doctor's very presence; and Pete made a mental note to ask her about that later.

"So," she said, interrupting the silence that had fallen, "what's the flooding thing about?"

-BAD WOLF-

"The water's been rising for a while, you knew that," he was saying. "We thought it was just from the breach, but when it closed and it kept flooding we started considering the possibility of other factors."

"Did you find anything?" the Doctor and Rose inquired in unison. Heat prickled in her cheeks and she looked to the carpet for guidance; the Time Lord glanced over at her, looking confused and more than a little concerned. His right leg jiggled up and down restlessly, as if he couldn't bear to sit still even for a second.

If Pete noticed the tension between them, he didn't show it. "We did," he affirmed. "A couple of weeks after you left. We located a transmission coming from the basement of an old warehouse in Cardiff. Torchwood Three tried to investigate, no one came back—"

"Seems to be a theme with T3," Rose muttered, still trying to reacquaint herself with normal thought patterns.

"—and shortly after that it got worse. Half the planet's flooded." He paused to breathe. "Whatever this thing is, it's not just using the water we already have. It's taking water from somewhere else and putting it here."

"And you're sure the object you detected is the source of the flooding?" the Doctor asked, mercifully taking his eyes off of her.

"It's all we've got to go on," he admitted. "Now, you don't have to do this if you don't want to, Rose. It's your choice, after all. I'm just telling you what we know so far."

"Are you kidding?" she retorted, smiling a little. "Insanely dangerous device no one's come back from? Sounds perfect."

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the Doctor giving her a fond look; she couldn't quite stop herself from returning it before a weight crashed over her mind.

She shouldn't do that. Not for a while. What if this Doctor was less controlled about his emotions, what if he thought she…?

The thought was ridiculous and seemed to come from nowhere, but she flushed and glanced away anyhow. Pete looked at her quizzically and she pretended not to notice.

"So where exactly was the signal coming from?" the Time Lord said; she let herself relax, fading out of the conversation. She didn't have to fly the ship, after all.

What she did have to do, though, was figure out the tangle of thoughts inside her own head. What was the _doing?_ It didn't make sense—having no qualms about treating this Doctor as if he'd merely regenerated again and not been a totally different version of himself (there _was _a difference; she had to tell herself that, or she would go completely insane), and then suddenly being unable to even look at him… It didn't make sense. She tested herself by studying him as he discussed… whatever he was discussing with Pete, and felt an odd double twinge somewhere between her lungs—he was _the Doctor_, but… but… but he wasn't the _same, _but it was _wrong_, but he—

It made absolutely no sense, and the more she thought about it the more it unnerved her. She wasn't normally this conflicted, not even when it came to him. Hell, she'd taken to having Pete around with barely a hint of awkwardness between them (and that was mostly on his side, what with suddenly having someone who was _basically _his daughter and yet not, and on top of that having to deal with her grieving). Yes, she'd been around the Doctor infinitely more than she'd been around her father (either version); yes, she knew the Doctor better, and would therefore be less comfortable with the parallel; but… not this much. It wasn't as if she had a way back home (did she? No; she'd checked, she'd looked so hard, there was no way back, she'd _accepted _that, stop it, Rose). Her old Doctor, her original Doctor, could hardly fault her for moving on—

Who said this was moving on? Who said she even—

She fought the growing urge to bash her head against something, and was ineffably relieved when the Time Lord decided he knew enough about where he was going not to end up a couple of galaxies over by mistake, and it was therefore time to go.

-BAD WOLF-

_…okay, so maybe that was overdoing it a little, but you can hardly fault me when… when THIS is happening. The Doctor's already half-besotted with her, of course he is, and she's not helping. What else am I supposed to do? Give them my blessing? She's not _his._ Normally I'd think they were infinitely adorable, possibly try to encourage them, but in this scenario I simply can't. And not just because I was created to keep Rose and her first Doctor together—she's tearing the _universe _apart, and even though it's not my home universe and I therefore have no responsibility over what happens to it, my creator is currently inhabiting it. If someone else decides to come along and destroy that world, fine, but I have to get Rose out of it first._

_I really wish she wasn't self-aware enough to understand that some of the thoughts she's been having of late aren't normal. Usually I'd be able to get her to go completely against every belief, every notion she's ever had, without her noticing—but all this trans-Void manipulation is… tricky._

_Especially since the Doctor I'm trying so hard to get Rose back to is getting harder and harder to look after. I should probably throw another companion at him before too long, because this is just getting ridiculous._

_Sigh. I'll try and fiddle about with the parallel Doctor's mind again, but at this stage I'm not sure how much help it'll be. Enough to delay him until the universe starts cracking, I hope—there's no way he'll be able to justify keeping her then._

-BAD WOLF-

And even though this chapter is normal-length, it feels kind of insufficient after the 7000-word monster I had the time before the last update…

Okay. So I'm going to tell myself in No Uncertain Terms that I have to get a chapter done by _Friday_, so I'll have it done by Saturday, so it can subsequently be betaed and uploaded by Saturday night. …hopefully. And we'll see how that works, because the whole starting-on-Wednesday thing apparently only works with author's notes. Sigh.

Interestingly enough, this chapter sees the first instance of the ARC WORDS!! …mostly because I only figured out what the arc words _were _about a month ago. But that's not the point!

And I'm in Support Stacie! Woo!

Hope you liked, and be well, everyone. :)


	18. Floodplain, part III

And, once again, I totally fail to update on a Saturday! XD Rassilon, I'm a bit fail, aren't I?

**Disclaimer:** Just in case, somehow, you have missed all the other disclaimers I've put up in the 190,000-odd words I've uploaded on this site, I own nothing.

SIAPNIAN: I didn't notice this until just now, but _this thing is novel-length._ And it's nowhere NEAR finished. This is awesome. XD

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by Brona19. Thank you, sir. –hugs-

-BAD WOLF-

The TARDIS materialised half an inch above the water and sank sulkily into it. She was still in pain from her hovering stint, she had been forced to make one of those short hops that she hated so much, and she was having to slip in and out of the Vortex more times that day than she had had to in years. Decades. So, understandably, she didn't want to have to land in the middle of a flood that reached a third of the way up her shell. She'd have to let them open her doors and then her insides would get wet too and it would take her ages to channel the stuff out of her…

Her resident Time Lord, after a brief struggle, managed to convince her to let him out. Water poured in, splashing against her circuits, and she sparked, annoyed. When all this was over, she was going to land somewhere warm and dry and perilous to her passengers, and she would use that time they spent trying to get out of danger to sleep. And she would _enjoy_ it.

She used that thought to stop her instinct to snap her doors shut and switch off right then and there—but she decided she still had the right to grumble in the back of her residents' minds for as long as they could hear her.

Ignoring his timeship's sulking, the Doctor closed the doors after his companion and stepped forward. His plimsolls squished uncomfortably as he sloshed his way through the flood. It felt odd, not that he had to wade in it; somehow… Not exactly thicker, but… It was almost imperceptibly more resistant to being walked through than normal water. It wouldn't have been noticeable to most, but the Doctor had never been most, so he most definitely noticed.

Of course, that only made sense; he had sincerely doubted that this substance was your average Earth water from the start. He'd have to do a scan to figure out what, exactly, it was... Later, though. Right now he just wanted to keep his balance.

As if that thought had triggered instability in his companion, Rose's foot struck something in the murky liquid and she slipped. Instinctively, he reached out to steady her, catching her elbow and awkwardly shifting so she collapsed towards him as opposed to the water.

"You alright?" he inquired, needlessly, as she had clearly not come to any harm. He wasn't protesting the fact that she had fallen in the first place, of course, but he didn't analyse that particular thought.

Startled, she leaned against him until she felt she could stand properly again. As soon as she did, though, she pulled away from him as quickly as the water hindering their movements would allow.

Her physical absence, so soon after the sensation of her human warmth pressed against his chest, ached far more sharply than he's expected—far more than it _should_—and, before he'd properly thought things through, he caught her hand just as it passed by his.

She glanced at him, an unfathomable look on her face; he gave her a faint half-smile in explanation. The awkwardness following her actions that morning had gone on for long enough; it would kill him if it remained. He had to at least _try _to show her that, although said event had been extremely uncomfortable (well, for her, anyway; he was fine with it, and don't follow that train of thought too much farther, Doctor, you'll regret it, you know you will), it didn't necessarily mean anything, change anything.

Rose hesitated and, for a terrifying (terrifying?) moment, he thought she would retreat; but even if she didn't like the idea of holding his hand at that moment, the stark logic of having him there to catch her should she stumble again appealed to her. With a faint tightening of the lips that could almost, _almost _be construed as a smile, she accepted the contact.

He shouldn't have been that… that happy about that. She was a human, not even native to this universe, and although there was a faint shimmer of alien Time permanently shrouding her in golden non-light, he shouldn't be this fascinated by her. No, "fascinated" wasn't quite the right word…

Whatever it was that he felt, it was wrong. She wasn't even _his_; she clearly belonged to his parallel, and he should take her back to him, he really should…

He mentally shook himself. That was ridiculous; she was travelling with _him_, wasn't she, not looking for his twin? And if this other version of him loved Rose as much as she seemed to think, surely he would have tried to get back to her. And yet, past that brief crack that had appeared in Norway, there hadn't been so much as a trans-Voidal blip ever since the Canary Wharf breach had been so brutally shattered. He hadn't even _tried_.

But, said the slowly-shrinking part of him that was still logical, what if her presence did damage to the timeline? What then? He was supposed to protect the universe, not help to rip it apart.

It wasn't certain she would do that much, he reasoned. He could probably hold everything together, even without the Time Lords backing him.

_And what if you can't? What if the world breaks because you're too selfish to let her go?_ (For a moment he wondered why there was a voice in his head, and then he quite abruptly forgot about it.)

He'd… He'd take her back before it came to that. This world would accept her as one of its own eventually. And—he recoiled at the thought—one day, maybe, he'd ask her if she wanted to go back. Maybe. But not now, she hadn't even seen this universe yet, and she needed to make an informed decision, didn't she? Of course she did. He'd show her the beauties of this world and then ask if she wanted to return. Because she needed to know what she was leaving, of course. He wasn't keeping her simply because she fascinated him, or because he found her amazing, or because the thought of a day in the TARDIS without her made him nauseous even though she'd only been there for fifteen days. He was keeping her in the dark for her sake and her sake only. Yup, that was it.

Content with his train of thought, he walked on, unaware of the goddess seething at him a universe away.

-BAD WOLF-

_GRAH! I hate that man sometimes! How anyone can lie to themselves with that kind of regularity and illogic and still manage to be tricked is absolutely beyond me. And considering how many things are genuinely above by ability to understand, that's saying something._

_He's so stubborn. And Rose isn't helping. What was she _thinking_, taking his hand like that, after I TOLD her not to?? I mean, yes, as far as she knows there's no way home and she might as well make do with what she's got, but honestly. This is ridiculous. She never got over bouts of awkwardness this quickly with her original Doctor; I've no idea what's going on._

_Speaking of our Doctor, I'm not sure about the companion I threw at him. Her name's Martha and she seems fairly promising, but she's also exhibiting a dangerous level of attraction towards our dearly beloved Time Lord. They've got an adventure involving a living sun, of all things, coming up—perhaps I can throw a pretty-boy at her to distract her from him. Pretty-boys always seemed to distract Rose… hmm._

_Do you know how hard it is to keep track of things in _two _universes at the same time? No, I don't suppose you would. Mortals._

_Sigh._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose had never really liked trudging through water, and this was no exception. This, in fact, was quite an example of _why _she didn't like it; water-trudging generally incited a distinct lack of balance, which incited falling, which incited being caught by a certain Time Lord, which incited certain Time Lord apparently deciding that she couldn't stand on her own and needed him to hold her hand. Which was odd for a multitude of reasons.

Well, it wasn't _odd_, really, she supposed; her old Doctor (why was she suddenly treating him like the angsty, leather-jacketed version she'd first met? It wasn't as if he'd regenerated, he was still alive and out there, somewhere) had done the same all the time, and it had never failed to give her that happy little glow between her lungs. He'd take her hand and sort of grin at her and she would _know _that everything was going to be absolutely fine. It was normal. It was right.

She supposed that was partially what was bothering her; because as hard as she tried, she couldn't quite convince herself that this was _wrong._ She wasn't getting the happy little glow, but she felt… comfortable. Safe.

And that was bad.

_Why is it bad?_ she demanded of herself. _You're not making sense._

It… it was just… It wasn't right, and that was it. There was still the chance of getting back home—

If there had been one, the Doctor would have told her straight away. There was no reason for him to lie to her when they first met; even if he was somehow attached to her _now_ (ridiculous), he wouldn't have been then. So there couldn't have been a way back, or he would have told her straight away; he would have returned her then.

There was no logical reason for her to feel anything but comfortable. So she ignored the prodding in the back of her head that kept telling her that _this was wrong_, and she went and held the Doctor's hand, dammit.

She felt intensely as if eyes were being rolled at her, and that made no sense either. Then again, not much had been making sense recently when it came to the thoughts entering and leaving her own mind, so it didn't particularly alarm her.

The warehouse, when they sloshed damply into it, wasn't particularly pleasant. The water was about an inch higher inside than it was outside, and Rose grimaced as it seeped coldly around her knees. At least, she thought, that meant that the water was definitely coming from here—or some of it, anyway.

It was also rather dark in there, and remained so until the Doctor managed to fish out a torch from somewhere in his jacket. He flicked it on, but it hardly improved the look of the place; shadows leapt sulkily along the walls, the light reflecting against the ripples in the water and throwing odd shapes against the ceiling.

"I vote we find whatever's in here and go," Rose commented, eyeing a doorway suspiciously. "Not the most attractive warehouse I've been to." Her voice echoed back at her, distorted and loud, and she flinched.

"It could be worse," the Doctor replied. "Dark, scary things could be jumping out of the ceiling at us."

"And now that you've said that, they will."

He considered that for a moment. "Mm," he said thoughtfully. "Quite possibly. But we'll be alright." He gave her a brief, reassuring grin.

"All the same," Rose continued, looking behind her, "the faster we find this thing, the faster we can dry off, yeah?"

"True. Hold this." The Time Lord handed her the light and started fumbling around in his jacket again. She took the device, trying (and failing) to keep it from reflecting off the water in such an intimidating way. The Doctor had let go of her hand to search through his pockets, and she swallowed the faint jolt of alarm at the loss. She was a big girl, she could get through life without him there to hold her hand. She'd proven that, after Canary Wharf; and just because he was here again (albeit in a different form) didn't mean she couldn't stand on her own.

The buzzing whine of the sonic screwdriver broke her out of her thoughts, and she glanced over to see the Time Lord slowly turning around, pointing the device in front of him and listening carefully. As always, Rose tried to listen too, to see if she could make sense of the little whirrs overlapping with the harsher grating noise; but whatever the sounds were telling the Doctor were beyond her.

"This isn't water," he said matter-of-factly, stepping slowly forwards, towards one of the more menacing doorways. "Well, it is and it isn't."

Instinctively, she followed. "What do you mean?" she inquired as softly as she could, just in case she would distract him from whatever the screwdriver was telling him.

"It's _basically _water," he said, "sort of. But there are some pretty heavy organic traces hanging about." He looked over at her. "This water," he said, "is alive."

If there was anywhere to jump to, she would have jumped out of the substance. As it was, she took a slightly violent step to the side. "We've been walking around in _aliens _for the past ten minutes?"

"Six," he corrected. "Rassilon, you humans have no timesense at all, do you? But anyway, yes. Basically." He inhaled. "They seem to be able to control their movements, as well—look." The screwdriver was suddenly aimed down; the pool rippled oddly, which was only to be expected—but he changed the setting and suddenly, with a strange kind of whine, it split away from the noise. Within seconds, the only dry spot in the entire warehouse was directly below where the screwdriver was being pointed.

"So what's that mean?" she asked.

He gave her a confused look. "It means… the resonance is painful to them."

She giggled a little at that; some things never changed. "No, I meant what we're supposed to do," she corrected him, grinning. "Since this isn't just… a bunch of random water. What does that mean for us?"

He looked at a wall, nodding slowly as he hissed a slow inhalation. "It means," he said, "we're dealing with an invasion."

Rose nodded slightly. "Alright, then," she said. "So that thing that we're trying to find—" the Doctor suddenly started scanning again, as if she had reminded him of his purpose there; she smiled at his antics— "is what, a teleport?"

"Probably." He continued walking towards the menacing door. "But whatever it is, the signal's coming from below us."

"I take it you mean the basement, and not just down a couple of steps or something."

"Yup." He glanced at her. "I'll be able to retrieve it, don't worry. I can hold my breath for a lot longer than you people."

"I know that," she interjected. "But… if those things are trying to kill us…" She paused for a moment, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. "Are you gonna be alright?"

"It's only water," he told her softly. "It can't hurt me. Well, not if I'm paying attention." He flashed her a quick, genuine grin—the kind that she'd seen out of her old Doctor just a few seconds after his regeneration, the kind that seemed to brighten the world around it even now. "Which I will be."

"You'd better," she muttered, studying the water.

He blinked, amused, and turned to leave. "Oh!" he said, whipping back around and wading as quickly as he could to her. "Take this."

She stared as he pressed the screwdriver into her grasp. "But—"

"I've already set it," he interrupted. "If you're attacked, just hold the button down. They'll retreat before too long." She glanced up; he wasn't looking at her, opting instead to examine her hands.

"But don't you need it?" she asked him worriedly, trying and finally managing to meet his gaze.

"The worst they can do to me is take me to wherever they're coming from," he informed her. "Which is precisely where I want to be, so it's hardly a threatening prospect." He blinked at her affectionately, squeezing her hands gently before letting her go. "I'll be back before you know it," he told her, and sloshed away into the darkness.

-BAD WOLF-

Blargh. That chapter was shorter than the others. I am ashamed of myself. –is ashamed- But there was really no better place to end it without cutting bits that would be better suited in future chapters… and… yeah. I'm sorry.

I had something I was going to say here, but I can't remember what it—OH!! I just remembered! My excellent good friend, TheDisturbedPoet, has begun to write a Doctor Who/Zelda crossover. She's just written the first chapter so far, but 'tis glorious indeed. I want to hug it. With camembert! So you should all look at it, srslytrufax.

And I am… STILL in the Support Stacie April Author Auction, so THERE.


	19. Floodplain, part IV

I am _so _sorry this is so late, even for my normal lateness. Things have been happening all week and I literally only finished this instalment this afternoon. In apology, I haven't had this betaed so it can be brought to you a little faster, but in worse shape… so… well, we'll see how it goes, yeah?

**Disclaimer: **Do I seriously have to say this _again?_

SIAPNIAN: So I've been considering setting up a Livejournal or something for this 'verse (because yes, I am continuing it after this… series, for lack of a better term, is over) so that if something comes up that would conflict with the update schedule, I'll actually be able to TELL you people. What say you? Y/N?

**WARNING: **Un-betaed. I know, I'm scared too…

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor was annoyed to find that not only was the water alive, but it was thoroughly mobile; as soon as he was totally submerged, it forced its way into his lungs via his nostrils in a manner that was thoroughly unnatural for water to be able to do. Which meant that the liquid wasn't innocent in the least, which meant that he actually had to deal with _it _instead of something humanoid (or at least humanoidish) that he could just talk to. He was good at persuading humanoids; he had very little idea of how to talk to a puddle. Was it telepathic? Could it understand speech? Was this all one massive creature or quite a few little ones? What was he supposed to _do _about all this?

The substance sloshed around his lungs most uncomfortably, but didn't try anything else. He supposed that it was used to just having humans swimming around in it; and humans were quite susceptible to having their air supply cut off. The Doctor, obviously, was not human and was therefore surprisingly blasé at the idea of his attempted drowning; this seemed to confuse the creatures (creature?), as for some time it/they just sat there, not even trying to stop him.

As he swam around the last corner, though, that changed. The liquid—which he had already noted was slightly too thick for normal Earth water—got even denser; shortly thereafter, it suddenly shifted from its original murky hue to jet-black. The latter, although unexpected, wasn't necessarily problematic; it might have baffled a creature relying on normal sight, but the Doctor's sight could hardly be described as "normal". It was a bit annoying, yeah, but it certainly wouldn't deter him.

No, the thing that was worrying was the way the water was thickening, pressing in on him. It was alive, it could feel pain… presumably, if it got packed in too tight it would hurt itself, but the question was whether that would occur before or after it crushed him. He was more resistant to damage than most species, but already his movements were getting more laboured. Too much more and he'd be immobilised—and not long after that…

For a split second he almost considered regretting leaving his sonic screwdriver with Rose, but as soon as the very smallest part of that thought began to step out into his mind, he squashed it. If he was having troubles, it was good that he'd left it with her—she would be in even more danger, fragile and human as she was. No, the thing he should be berating himself over was not that he'd given his screwdriver to her—it was that he didn't have a spare.

The water pressed in harder, evidently encouraged by his difficulty moving, and in very short order he was thoroughly immobilised. Either this was as tightly-compressed as the liquid could go, or they wanted him alive for some reason; those theories were small comfort, though, as he was in enough pain by this point that had he been able to he would have very much enjoyed a good scream.

He learned with a kind of abrupt shock exactly why he was still alive when the pressure impossibly _intensified_ in a band of pure agony around his chest. He felt something give way, and a muffled snap resounded through his body at the same time as a sharp fire flared in one of his ribs; he tried valiantly to flinch and found that all he could manage was a kind of pained hiccupping spasm that achieved nothing but the expelling of some of the liquid in his lungs.

The water retreated then, apparently satisfied with… with… whatever it had found out. What was it? That he wasn't unbreakable? That he was fully capable of feeling pain? That just because he was clearly not human didn't mean they had no weapons they could use against him? _What had been the point?_

His chest throbbed angrily at him and the liquid gave him no answer. What it did do, however, was push him forward—still immobilised—, the flat black colour lifting as they were satisfied he was under their power.

Forward, towards the little device he had gone down here to retrieve, which was suddenly humming with a menacingly greenish light.

Well, he thought, this wasn't _precisely _how he'd planned on finding out the purpose of the object, but it worked.

-BAD WOLF-

_He's an amusing creature, I'll give him that. Not right, not real, but amusing nonetheless. I may have to keep watching him after I fix this problem with Rose, just to see what he'll do…_

_But that's not important. What _is _important, or at least worrying, is Davros and his strangeness. It should not have been that easy to erase, and it _especially _shouldn't have been that… quiet. Every undone thing in history has had a backlash of some kind—a memory or an event or even an entire person that hadn't been there before—but this… Nothing. It is literally as if it never was. And I'm good, but I'm not that good. It doesn't make sense._

_There's no evidence that Davros was even planning to do anything of the kind. At this point in the timeline, I can't even find him, much less see what he might have been scheming before I… well… I think I stopped him…_

_…but it still doesn't make sense…_

_If I hadn't been watching him very closely for some time now, I would blame Q. Normally he's to blame when something this nonsensical happens in the higher dimensions, but he's being surprisingly quiet. Which, I suppose, should worry me even more, but I have bigger things to think about. Things like an entire battle literally never having happened. Ever. Not even a flicker to indicate it was even a possibility._

_I don't understand this. And that's frightening in itself._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose had, about thirty seconds after the Doctor vanished, taken up pacing. It didn't really help calm her thoughts, but at least it was something to _do_, something she could focus on besides her own internal rambling.

So, as she rambled, she sloshed rhythmically back and forth. There wasn't much else she could do, after all; as much as she hated being told to stay there and wait because it was too dangerous, she had to admit just this once that the Doctor was right. The more time passed, the more she was convinced she would have been more of a hindrance than a help to him—and the more her concern for _his _safety wore at her. He shouldn't have left her the screwdriver. She wasn't even doing anything to threaten the creatures, there was no reason for them to go after her… She wished she had thought to force him to keep the device, to stay in the TARDIS if it made him feel better—anything if it would have made him take the thing down with him—but she had been so confused by the gesture that she couldn't…

Not confused. Confused wasn't the right words. Nor was surprised, or humbled, or any other word that sprang to mind. The only phrase that seemed to fit even remotely was something her father (her original father, not the native of this world) had told her, so very long ago, so very far away.

_"I gave you my car keys… You don't give your car keys to a complete stranger."_

No, Dad, she thought fitfully, you didn't. And the Doctor didn't leave his sonic screwdriver with just anyone, not even under these circumstances. He would have found a way to protect almost anyone, companion or no, but the screwdriver… The screwdriver was special. It was always with him, to the point where it seemed almost an extension of himself; and he wouldn't leave it with just anyone, not even for a short time. The screwdriver was different, it was more important, it was…

Was it? nudged something at the back of her mind. Was it really, or would any Doctor have given it up to anyone?

She sped her pacing, the water splashing fretfully around her knees as she strode relentlessly through it. It _was _different, she mentally snapped. This wasn't just some nice little gadget that was handy to have around. She'd seen him trying to function without it, seen his frustration at tasks that had been so simple beforehand; he relied on the thing, _needed_ it just to…

She stilled at that thought. He needed it. He _needed _it, and he'd given it to her, and now he was left without it. Not defenceless—she knew her Doctor better than to assume that for a moment—but severely handicapped.

Oh, she thought with growing dread. What if the water attacked _him_? Would he be alright? She knew he was resistant to suffocation, but not immune (if the circumstances were exactly wrong), and who knew what else this water could do? If he died down there…

She started pacing again, angry at herself now. That was just ridiculous, she told herself; he'd be fine, Rose, he'd come back up in a few minutes… he had probably gotten distracted, stayed down there for a bit longer than she'd thought, fascinated with something or other. That was very Doctor, wasn't it? And besides, hadn't he said—not very long ago at all, either—that she had an absolutely rubbish timesense? She was probably just exaggerating or overreacting or whatever. It had probably only been a couple of minutes.

Felt longer, though, she thought forlornly. She was paralysingly aware of each passing second, every scrap of every moment in which the Doctor remained missing. Oh, where _was _he?

_I don't even know why you're worrying so much_, muttered that little niggle at the back of her mind. _You know he'll be fine either way—he always is—and he's not even your Doctor, anyway._

"Yeah," she muttered, "and Pete isn't technically my dad. Didn't stop Mum."

She froze at her own words as soon as they were out of her mouth. She hadn't… She hadn't meant it like that, she thought weakly. She'd just meant that… that just because this Doctor wasn't her original one didn't mean that she couldn't travel with him, help him, worry about him. She wasn't replacing her first Doctor, she was just… She hadn't meant that she was going to fall in love with him or anything, she was just…

Flushing an interesting shade of scarlet, she rubbed her face with her free hand and reminded herself in no uncertain terms that she was most decidedly not feeling anything for this Doctor beyond the platonic. …except for that one time. …and the other one. But those were just flukes, nothing to get excited about. Isolated incidents. Her flawed, inconstant little human heart doing what it had done a thousand times before for lesser reasons. She didn't… She…

But why not? a very small, very quiet part of her mind whispered. What was stopping her? There was absolutely no way she could do better, there _was _no possibility of "better", not when it came to the Doctor. _Any_ Doctor. Her old Doctor couldn't reach her, and he'd wanted her to be happy. Why couldn't she, with his parallel?

But that Doctor loved her, she knew that (even though she couldn't help but wish he'd managed to tell her in so many words). He loved her, and probably still did, and her running off with anyone else seemed almost like a betrayal.

But she wasn't just running off with just anyone else, she reminded herself. This _was _the Doctor in essentially every way; subtly different, but basically the same man. She'd loved her original Time Lord after he'd regenerated; how was this all that different, under the circumstances?

But—

"Agh!" she snapped, slamming her palm against the cold wall. The brief shock helped, sifting the chaos out of her head. Sighing, she rested her forehead against the concrete and tried to get her thoughts to shut up.

"You alright?" asked the Doctor.

She very nearly jumped out of her skin at that. Startled, she stumbled back, rapidly losing her balance and splashing into the water before he could even make a move to catch her.

He took a step forward anyway. "Rose! You okay?"

Snapping grammatically incorrect curses in a language long dead, she shoved herself back to her feet. "Yeah," she added, after she had finished her rant. If anyone in the immediate vicinity knew Gallifreyan, they probably would have been confused as to why she was yelling about a TARDIS, but she didn't actually _know _the language very well. It wasn't her fault that the Doctor hadn't even taught her the rude parts of it, much less…

…speaking of the Doctor, why wasn't he protesting? Normally, he'd already be rambling on about exactly what she'd got wrong in things like word order and pronunciation…

Her Doctor had done that, she corrected herself. This one might not care as much. This one might still be in that particular stage where he didn't even want to think about his people, let alone argue with her about their language.

Still, she couldn't shake the instinct that something was very, very wrong. She looked him over; he looked exactly like the Doctor, and even had that kind of puzzled frown at her scrutiny; but… but… there was something _different_, there was something very, very not right about all this.

A traitor voice somewhere in the back of her head muttered something about that something simply being the fact that he wasn't _her_ Doctor, but she ignored it. Trivialities about parallel worlds and their inhabitants were most definitely not what was going on just then.

But she couldn't quite put her finger on _what _was putting her off, so she decided to shove that in the back of her mind for the time being. "Did you find it, then?" she asked him.

"What? Oh." He glanced down, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a small black box. "Doesn't look like much," he admitted, "but we should be able to pinpoint wherever the water's coming from with this."

She frowned at it for a moment. She wasn't particularly good with technological identification, but it didn't look quite like a teleport or transmitter or anything remotely like what she'd been expecting. In fact, it looked surprisingly like the sort of thing one would charge a laptop with, only without the cords.

The niggling wrongness jabbed at her again, and she shifted. "Alright," she said, because she felt she should say something. She started trying to wring her hair out, not very much liking the idea of having sentient water all over her. "So that's it, then? We can go and figure out what's going on now?"

He glanced back up at her. "Yeah," he informed her. "Come on."

He started walking out of the warehouse, sloshing gently as he went. He dripped a little, and all in all looked… basically like he was supposed to.

But _something wasn't right._ She knew that, so fully and completely that it didn't even require questioning. And if her time in the TARDIS had taught her anything, it was that when she felt like that, she was almost always correct. The Doctor had many times waxed positively poetic about the complexity and beauty of human instinct, and this… this was instinct.

So, instead of handing it to him, she surreptitiously slipped the sonic screwdriver in her pocket, letting its familiar weight reassure her as she started to follow. She hadn't intended to stumble, but she found herself unable to keep up; as she floundered, unbalanced, she instinctively reached out for his hand.

He flinched away, and she knew with a sickening, crawling dread that she had been absolutely right.

Something was very, very wrong about all of this, and she was going to find out what it was.

-BAD WOLF-

Okay, so I know that the last two chapters have been primarily thought-based. I would say something about the characters needing to understand their own minds or some such Staazula, but really it was an error on my part; the way the plot works from one "episode" of this two-parter to the second didn't give me enough to work with decently in the first few chapters. The inner monologues (and, thanks to the Bad Wolf, dialogues) are part of a shameless ploy to up my word-count to the average level. I am sorry I loaded so much plotness in the second part, but I only realised my mistake while I was starting to write this one and… well… by then, it was too late.

I promise there will be more action in the next chapter, though. And, again, I apologise that this is so extremely late. Right now, where I am, it is technically still Sunday, but… I am so very sorry.

I had something else I wanted to put here, but I can't remember what it was, so I'll just remind you all for the 517th time that I'm in the Support Stacie April Author Auction (which actually takes place late in March this time, oddly enough), that I love you all (contrary to popular belief), that I'm going to stop trying to up my word-count through this appallingly long author's note, and be well.

Oh, and if there are any typos in here that I didn't catch (which there almost certainly are), blame my mum's keyboard. The S key doesn't quite work all the time… among other things.

Fairfarren!


	20. Floodplain, part V

So I skipped Sunday school AND prayer group to work on this, thus earning the censure of some of my fellow churchgoers, so you'd better like it. XD (Well, in a way I suppose I half-attended prayer group… except it was more "please, Lord, let me finish this sort-of-on-time" than anything particularly structured, so... XD)

**Disclaimer:** -exasperated sigh- Can I just consider the rest of this fic disclaimed after this?

SIAPNIAN: Two weeks until I can start reading _The Way of Things _again! YAAAY!!

**NON-WARNING:** Betaed by brona19, on about thirty seconds' notice because he's just that awesome. Let us give him HUGGLES!

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor drifted. Everything was very quiet here, in the semi-consciousness at the back of his mind. He wasn't sure where his body was at that moment and decided in the end that it didn't much matter. Strange body, this one was; always running off. It hadn't run off without him before, of course, but he supposed that it had only been a matter of time. He'd just sit here and wait for it to come back, he decided; it couldn't get far without him, anyway. It'd be back before too long, and in the meantime, he could slip even farther away from awareness. He hadn't slept in… in… how long _had _it been? Instinctively, he reached for the ticking in his mind, tried to recall…

He couldn't. He had no recollection of the last time he'd had more than a nap. Oh, this was bad; Rose was going to kill him…

That thought struck something. Rose… yes, where was Rose? He didn't think he'd misplaced her; had she wandered off or—

—_the water_—

The Doctor jolted back into awareness rather more quickly than was probably good for him, but the momentary discomfort was ignored. Where was Rose? Was she safe? Had she…?

No, he thought, forcing himself to control his instinctive panic. No; he'd left her with the sonic screwdriver, she was safe. Nothing could happen to her as long as she kept hold of that. And she was a clever girl; she'd managed to take care of herself without him before, so she'd be fine now.

He, on the other hand, was most decidedly _not _fine, despite the undeniable fact that he was far more clever even than Rose. Which meant, hopefully, that he could find his way out of whatever danger he was in without the aid of sonic devices.

First things first, though: how quickly was he dying?

Well, his body seemed uncomfortably far away even in his current state of mostly-consciousness, so that seemed to imply that the answer was "far too quickly for his liking". That was upsetting; he didn't want to regenerate yet, he was still practically new…

Now. Why was he dying, and how could he stop it?

Forcing past the deep blackness that still beckoned him, he tried to take stock of exactly what was wrong. Both hearts were still working, that was good; nothing seemed to be wrong with his brain, his lungs were perfectly healthy if stationary, his respiratory bypass felt fully functional… but it wasn't doing anything useful.

Ah, he thought. That was why his thoughts were going a bit blurry around the edges. He was drowning, and evidently the water did not appreciate attempts by the aforementioned backup system to use it for oxygen. That wasn't very good, was it?

It took him a few seconds to remember how to move, but as soon as he managed it he sat up. The liquid resisted a little more than water generally was supposed to, but evidently he'd caught it by surprise; after that little bit of pressure, he burst unceremoniously out into air. _Breathable _air that didn't try to immobilise him or break his ribs or any of that, even. The sheer, unadulterated delight of that discovery was almost enough to remove any residual shame over the realisation that he'd been drowning in a pool two feet deep, and he spent several happy seconds concentrating on nothing more than enthusiastically restocking his oxygen supply. There was, after all, no telling when the water would try to stop him from doing so.

As his brain cleared, he noticed a pronounced buzzing in his head that had nothing to do with his near-suffocation. Come to think of it, there had been a bit of that when he was trying to retrieve the device (which, judging by his current circumstances, had indeed been a teleport).

Slowing his breathing now the water wasn't actively trying to drown him, he splayed out his fingers in the pool and reached towards the faint hum against his mind.

_—see? He just doesn't die. What do we do?_

He couldn't quite hold back a smirk at that. Of course, then the thought sank in that the stuff was _telepathic _on top of everything else—low-level, more impressions than words, but even so—and he scowled a little. At least, he thought, he might be able to reason with it that way—but it still made things a little more complicated. If it got the idea to attack using that power…

_He's completely invulnerable? _Odd; the second consciousness sounded almost exactly the same as the first—they blended together at the edges, as if they were two parts of the same mind. Fascinating.

_No. He is breakable—_vague images of what they'd done to his ribcage, and he winced—_but that's not the easiest way to be rid of him. It was very painful. _Painful to them? _That's why we came to you. What else is there? How else can we dispose of him?_

Concepts flicked across his mind, each one less desirable than its successor. He grimaced a bit; the chances for survival weren't good with any of those, and he wasn't sure if he could pressure the water into adopting whatever method where he had the best odds for keeping this (or any) body. More to the point, he wasn't sure if he'd be able to shift the decision in such a way as the liquid would assume it had been its own idea; humans were easy, as were most low-level telepaths, but the consciousness (consciousnesses?) of the water was structured in such a way as he wouldn't know where to begin.

He didn't even get an opportunity to try to figure it out before a decision was made without him. _Freeze him._

Well, he supposed, there were worse things…

_And make sure he is totally submerged in our kind when you do._

…Like that.

_And then get him off the ship and into space, like the first ones. We need no further resistance from these creatures._

He resolved then that, if he got back to the TARDIS in one piece, the first thing he was doing was constructing another screwdriver.

-BAD WOLF-

_Well, that could prove a little tricky to resolve. Sweet mother of Chaos, this Doctor I even more danger-prone than his counterpart sometimes! But I'll figure it out… I always do. Dunno why he'll need the second screwdriver, though—it's not like Rose will be staying long enough to need one anyhow, once I get that stupid Time Lord to see reason. Because I will. I'm just as stubborn as he is—or, more accurately, just as stubborn as Rose is. Means approximately the same thing, I know, but still._

_Speaking of my former host, there are a few thoughts going through her head that are… worrying, to say the least. I mean, I suppose I should have seen something of the sort coming even in her state, but I would have thought she of all people would understand the differences between parallel forms! After her run-ins with her parallel family and Ricky, I was half-expecting I'd have to persuade her _into _trusting the alternate Doctor, not out of it…_

_For that matter, why is she being so stubborn about claiming as her new-new-new Doctor (just like regeneration, indeed!)? After all she went through with her Doctor, why is she suddenly so willing to replace him with a cheap imitation who's only blundering around this universe because I dragged him into existence?_

_Perhaps it's genetic. And the erased… timeline, or… whatever it was that I'm fairly sure I stopped from happening, showed her deciding to stay with a knockoff Doctor with hardly a fight, but that doesn't seem quite… And anyway, at least that Doctor had all of his predecessor's memories, all of his love for her, and told her so. With this one, she has to start from scratch. I mean, yes, he's already quite attached to her, but that doesn't mean she gets to just give up on the original. Not when he's out there being all… depressed and whatnot._

_Speaking of him, I tried to throw my name at him while he was hitchhiking through a multi-story traffic jam. He didn't notice—either that, or he didn't want to. You can never really tell with the Doctor. Maybe I should try again…_

-BAD WOLF-

"So where are we going?" Rose inquired as they trudged through the flood. She hoped this would give her some indication of what, exactly, the… the… not-Doctor-thing was; if it could give her a suitably Doctorish answer, it probably had the real Time Lord locked up somewhere where it could access his memories (or had just possessed him outright). If it flustered him, though, that would imply that it was just a remarkably good copy, and the original might still be wandering around somewhere. She hoped desperately it was the second.

There was a pause. "Um," he said, glancing down at the object in his hand as if for guidance, "back… to the TARDIS, I should think. Run a few scans." He turned back to face her. "I could do some of that now, if you'd… let me have my screwdriver back."

She glanced at him sharply. So he'd seemed surprised at her question, unsure of his mission, and desirous of the sonic screwdriver; that implied that the real Doctor was okay, or at least free, but it still didn't exactly reassure her.

"No chance," she said, forcing her voice into some semblance of cheerful teasing. "As soon as you change the setting on that thing, the water will come up and drown us both. You know it will."

He blinked, annoyance flashing across his face for a split second before he schooled his features into blankness. She half-expected him to make some comment about how difficult it was to drown a Time Lord; but none was forthcoming. Did the copy even know the first thing about the Doctor?

"Suppose you're right," he muttered. "Best get back to the ship, then." He hesitated for a moment, then frowned. "Where's the TARDIS again?"

-BAD WOLF-

Once he'd heard what the flood (ooh, he quite liked that; maybe he should just call it that. It wasn't exactly turning anyone into a zombie, but his world wasn't a video game, either, so…) intended to do with him, the Doctor had quite sensibly started to look for an escape route. His normal practice of getting up and running like hell, although tempting, was likely to fail; the stuff could apparently change its density at will, and such a venture could only end with him fully submerged and at its mercy. Which was, conveniently, exactly the opposite of what he was trying to achieve, so there was no use continuing to consider it. What else was there?

He looked around. Cramped (for him) corridors, but definitely made for humanoids; handholds on the ceiling, so they were most likely monkeyish—which meant that, if he was very, very lucky…

There! About a foot above the water level, there was an exit. Annoyingly small, but surely it must get wider farther in; and even if it didn't… well. It wouldn't be too bad, provided he could crawl quickly enough. The walls were smooth; even if the water could go up a vertical surface, it would probably be quite delayed, and he'd at least be able to plan his next move. And besides, even maintenance hatches always led _somewhere._

He took one last breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and burst into motion.

-BAD WOLF-

Meanwhile, Rose's situation was nowhere near as exciting. Harrowing, yes; terrifying, yes; but not particularly thrilling. At this point, she wasn't even afraid for her own safety; the doppelganger at least seemed to realise that the Doctor wasn't going to go about attacking his companion, even if it had managed to make a mess of most of the less obvious parts of his personality. No, the matter that was worrying her dealt with the Time Lord, wherever he was—was he alright? What kind of situation had he managed to get himself into without her?

She had no answers to those questions, so she turned to the ones she was more likely to be able to solve: What was this copy, and how could she stop him? She didn't want him to know she'd figured out his nature; not until she knew how to stop him if he attacked her, anyway. But at the same time, wherever the real Doctor was, she was completely certain that he was in danger. The more she waited, the less time there was to save him—but if she just came out and told the fake that she knew he wasn't her Time Lord, she might end up too dead to save him at all. She didn't have random biological eccentricities to protect her; she was human, and mortal, and so very fragile, and if she couldn't fend him off…

She held the sonic screwdriver a little more tightly, the unfamiliar shape (how she wished she at least knew how to change the settings on this version; she could scan the doppelganger, figure out what he was, if it had been the same model her original Doctor had used) pressing reassuringly into her fingers. She'd figure it out. She would figure it out, and then she would stop him, and then she would find that stupid alien and rescue him from whatever he'd gotten himself into _this _time. Everything would be fine, she just had to _think._ Surely there was something she could do… What would she do as a matter of course with the real Doctor that this one didn't want her to do?

Her mind flickered back. She had fallen, she'd reached out for him. And he hadn't caught her. No, not just that—he'd not _tried _to. And just a few moments after, when she'd tried to take his hand to stop a repeat performance…

Glancing up to make sure he wasn't expecting her to do anything, she drummed her fingers against her thighs and sped up a little. As soon as she was close enough to do so, she darted out and snatched his hand in hers.

Her fingers passed straight through the appendage, droplets separating from the whole and splashing into the flood at their feet.

She jolted away, cradling her now-damp hand as if it had been burnt, and stared at what was most assuredly not any kind of Doctor.

-BAD WOLF-

He'd been right; the small entrance he'd seen had opened up into a larger corridor. Not quite as large as he would have liked, he thought sulkily as he dodged the ceiling, but it was better than crawling.

Unfortunately, he hadn't been quite so lucky when it came to the assumption that the water would be incapable of scaling (or at least decently delayed by) the smooth walls. It had lowed them down somewhat, but nowhere near enough; and instead of being able to rest a bit and plan what to do next, he'd had to start running almost immediately.

He still had no idea of where he was going, but at least he hadn't been caught yet. Nor would he, if he figured out the pattern of the corridors—or, better yet, found a map—

_Turn left._

He froze. Where had that come from? Why was it trying to instruct him and not kill him?

_There isn't time. They're coming._

With a sudden dread, he glanced down at his suit. It was soaked through, the liquid settling unnervingly along his skin. Well, at least it wasn't a _lot _of water…

_There isn't time. Turn LEFT! There's a ladder, a room at the top, you might be able to stop us…_

He didn't trust them.

_We know. Turn left._

He clenched his jaw, staring at the passageway they evidently wanted him to go through. He hated it, but he was actually considering obeying—aimless dashing about would only save him if he was lucky. As it was, he couldn't detect any malice in the order, but with a consciousness structured that strangely, what could he be missing?

_Turn left. There isn't time. Turn left._

Repetitive little buggers, weren't they?

He could hear the fast-paced trickling behind him grow louder, and he turned to see the pool he had been trying so hard to outrun rapidly spreading towards him.

_Run. Turn left._

He did.

-BAD WOLF-

The water-Doctor turned to face her, an expression of sweet confusion on his stolen face. "Rose, what's wrong? Why have we stopped?"

She swallowed hard, inching away. "You're…" she tried, then paused. "You're not real." You're one of them. The water." As soon as the words left her mouth, she felt almost infinitely stupid.

He gave her that baffled, disbelieving, what-are-you-even-on-about-you-ridiculous-human look that even the doppelganger knew about. She flushed; she was right, she _knew _she was right, but…

"What do you mean?" he asked her.

She shifted uncomfortably. "Just now," she said. "When I touched you, your hand was just…" She gestured vaguely. "Water."

He gave her a patronising half-smile, and she bristled. He wasn't the Doctor, the Doctor wouldn't smirk at her like that, and trying to slap either the copy or the real thing wouldn't do her any good… but still. "Rose," he said gently, "you're imagining things. It only makes sense; there are telepathic signatures coming from the flood."

She glared at him. "D'you think I'm daft?" she snapped. "I know what telepathic influence feels like, and I know what water feels like, even when it's being all… weird and gravity-defying." She held the sonic screwdriver a little more tightly, moving her thumb over the switch. "And," she added, "I know how to use this."

Silence.

"So are you going to tell me where the Doctor is now?"

-BAD WOLF-

The water drenching him had been right; shortly after he'd turned, he'd come across a ladder leading up to a hatch that opened into a room. A room with a chair, a window looking out at a very pretty starscape, and no exits, yes, but it was a room nonetheless; and its singular entrance, when closed, looked to be tight enough to at least delay the rest of the liquid. He could neither make it watertight or look to see if it already was without his screwdriver—a loss that was nagging at him more and more. How had he managed to get through life without the thing in the first place?

"Now," he said, pacing around the room to see if there was anything useful he'd missed the first time around (there wasn't), "why are you helping me now?"

_Because we are few._

"What does that mean?"

_Down there, we are many, and the hunger takes over._

He was having the increasing urge to look at what he was talking to, at least to be polite, but that was slightly difficult to do in this case. Instead, he wandered around for a bit and looked out the window. "So the more of you there are, the less friendly you get?"

_There are too many of us now, and not enough water to separate us._

He frowned a bit. "So you—"

_They're coming._

"What?"

_They're coming._

The Doctor glanced down. The hatch trembled gently, and droplets started to leak out of the sides, solidifying into a puddle that started to expand far more quickly for his taste. And there he was, stuck there with no means of escape except out the window.

_We're sorry._

-BAD WOLF-

The water-Doctor turned to face her fully, its expression unnervingly blank. "No," it said, and moved—far more quickly than she was expecting, far more quickly than she could have prepared for. Before she could even take a half-step backwards, he was pushing her into the water; before she could try to right herself, an unnameable pressure forced itself into her mind, immobilising her—removing even the ability to _want _to move.

So the flood _was _telepathic, she thought dimly, as she stared up at the liquid-distorted image of the fake Doctor.

Almost gently, the water trickled its way into her lungs and she sighed involuntarily, releasing the last of her oxygen to bubble to the surface.

-BAD WOLF-

Soo I've got the LJ up and running. The username is "TheAltVerse", and it's not particularly pretty at the moment but I'll work on that as soon as I can figure out how. So if anything goes wrong with the update pattern, you'll find out from there. I'm also thinking of posting other random bits about my progress and probably the fic itself as well. If there's anything else you'd like me to put in, tell me. :)

I'm… STILL in Support Stacie. WOOHOO![/cake]

Be well, everyone!


	21. Drowning, part I

And it's me again!

Disclaimer: I own… err… not much. Certainly nothing you'd care about.

SIAPNIAN: For those of you who did not see the Livejournal (TheAltVerse dot livejournal dot com) post, I am hereby making this announcement again: Because of Support Stacie and an unrelated original!fic writing commitment, I will be unable to update through April. I am dreadfully sorry about this, truly. But at least I'm not leaving you on a cliffie all that time, yeah? So, um, please don't kill me…

**WARNING: **Un-betaed.

-BAD WOLF-

It was peaceful, dying like this. Rose had faced death quite a few times in her life—quite probably more than was normal even for a companion of the Doctor's—and it always struck her how truly _quiet _it was. There came that point where all the pain and the screaming and the fear dripped away and then… nothing. Silence. Sleep. It was actually almost pleasant, all things considered.

Of course, said the tiny part of Rose's mind that was still conscious and fully aware of what was happening and how much she _should _be panicking right now, that was probably partly the fault of the water screwing around with her head. There'd be very little point in having its victims thrash about all over the place; it was easier to just let them die quietly. Happily, almost—yes, there was some kind of vague pleasure somewhere between her lungs. Odd, that. Good of the water to kill her that nicely, though. She didn't even really feel any pain.

But she couldn't sleep. Her eyes were closed, her thoughts were dim, her pulse was shallow as it twitched helplessly against her throat—but she couldn't die. Why was that?

She frowned a little, confused. That didn't make sense. She was dying, she _knew _she was dying. Why was she taking so long about it? What was holding her back? She supposed asphyxiation was hardly the quickest way to go, but surely she should have at least passed out by now…

An impression pressed itself hazily into her brain—there was something she needed to do. She couldn't go to sleep now, she had to… she had to… what?

Completely baffled now, she came a little more to her senses. There had to be _something _around here that would help her remember, something… The water was most likely making her forget (although the oxygen starvation couldn't have been helping), but… maybe… Frustrated, she clenched her hands. She had to—

—wait—

What was that? In her hand?

_Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it_

She traced the shape, running a thumb along the smooth metal. It was almost familiar… but shouldn't there be a faint texture there, little cracks along the surface?

Suddenly, she was totally and completely awake. She wasn't _in _her home universe, the sonic screwdriver was different here—but there it was, and there the Doctor was not, and _that _was why she couldn't die right now, she had to go to him and save his lives (again).

Which meant that she had to save her own life first. Easily done, since the stupid Time Lord had decided to be stupid and give her his only weapon against these things.

The switch was in a subtly different place than where she was used to, which threw her for a couple of seconds; but she found it quickly enough. The water melted away from her like… well, like water, actually; and she scrambled to her feet as quickly as she could, gasping. Luminously black splotches danced in front of her eyes and she stumbled, but kept her footing; she pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, wincing, and spent several seconds enjoying her newfound ability to breathe.

Finally, she felt somewhat more substantial. She let out a sigh and tugged her damp hair away from her face.

The fake Doctor stared at her for a moment, totally emotionless, and lost all semblance of solidity. He splashed unceremoniously into the rest of the water, and in the space of two seconds even the difference in colour was unnoticeable.

Telepathic, sentient, mobile water that changed colours, she thought. Fantastic.

"I don't suppose you'd be so kind as to tell me where the Doctor is?" she asked it.

It didn't even give her the honour of an answering ripple.

"Didn't think so," she mumbled, and scratched the side of her nose absently for a moment. There was only one thing for it, then; if she was going to find her (_her?_) Time Lord, she was going to have to follow him.

"I'm so going to kill him for this," Rose commented, and trudged back towards the warehouse.

-BAD WOLF-

So the Doctor's still in trouble, but at least Rose is alright, yeah?

Remember, peoples, I and many of my betters are being auctioned off as we speak. And if you didn't read the above SIAPNIAN, do so—it's actually important this time. (I know! Shocking!)

Be well, my minions—err—-coughs- friends!


	22. Drowning, part II

You know, this used to be a fairly straightforward fic. What happened?

**Disclaimer: **I don't even own myself at the moment, thanks to SS…

SIAPNIAN: Darn you, I-Can-Spell-Confusion-With-A-K, by making it nigh impossible to write this chapter before SS was over! –flail- But I resisted. Aren't you proud of me? … -notices pitchforks and torches- Guessing not. Oh well.

**Actually Very Important Announcement Indeed (AVIAI):** The aforementioned I-Can-Spell-Confusion-With-A-K has made a _trailer _for this thing. It is truly brilliant. It is on Youtube under the name DayDreamBeliever87, and I'm posting a direct link on my profile and the LJ now. Seriously. It's _epic._ It's making me speak in _way too many italics._

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet, who is awesome.

-BAD WOLF-

"I'm going to kill him for this," Rose repeated to herself, very quietly. "I'm going to find him, and then I'm going to kill him, and maybe his next regeneration will actually figure out that you don't just walk into a flood that very much wants to kill you after you've left your sonic screwdriver with your _companion!_"

The TARDIS whirred at her, although she wasn't entirely sure if it was agreement or amusement. Regardless, she did help her, gently indicating the floor-panel she was looking for after the human had pulled up the third wrong one.

Rose glanced inside and grinned, picking up the torch. That was, she decided, one aspect where her old Doctor's screwdriver had been decidedly better; you didn't have to lose several minutes searching for a secondary light source when the silly Time Lord had managed to get himself into danger _again_.

"You," she informed the TARDIS, "are the most amazing ship ever. You know that?"

The timeship hummed and flickered her lights to indicate that she did. Rose smiled a bit as she replaced the floor-panel; then, after briefly patting the console to further indicate her gratitude, she ran back outside.

Well, inasmuch as she _could _run in water that deep, she thought sulkily. It took her much longer than she would ordinarily have liked to get back to the warehouse, but she made it without incident, flicking on the torch and going through the doorway the Doctor had last entered. Not for the first time, she wished she knew the settings on this screwdriver; without the ability to do any kind of scan for extraterrestrial technology, she'd have to search every room she came across and hope she happened to trip over whatever the Time Lord had found.

Inhaling deeply (a privilege that had been stolen from her far too many times already), she started moving down the hall. Naturally, it was entirely dark apart from the light she'd brought; and that reflected off of the rippling water, throwing odd shadows against the walls. She swallowed. Wherever the Doctor brought her next (because she _would _find him alive and with the same face, whatever else happened), it had better be somewhere with very little water indeed. She didn't think she'd be able to look at the stuff the same way for some time.

Flicking the torchlight along the walls, she could only see one door, which was odd; but she certainly wasn't complaining. The fewer places there were for the object to be, the better.

The door led to a closet-like structure that didn't look very promising from the start; and she hesitated for a moment, trying to decide which would be the best course of action. She eventually decided not to risk it, and spent a few precious minutes tearing the room apart. Not having found anything even remotely alien-looking, she went back into the hall, full of fresh fears and frustrations to think of.

What if he _did _regenerate? Minor annoyances aside, she really did like this version. She'd spent more time with him than she had with her first Doctor; despite the knowledge that this face and personality were just as temporary, she'd managed to get used to all his hyper, pinstriped defiance. What would she do if he changed again? Could she get used to yet another version of the man she—

"He won't change," she told herself firmly, interrupting her train of thought before she started hyperventilating.

And then, quite suddenly, the floor wasn't there anymore. She stumbled, managing to fall backwards and land with some semblance of control; but she still ended up far more submerged than she would have liked, and scrambled to her feet as soon as she could.

The floor _was _there, then; it was just a bit lower than it originally had been. Stairs?

Rose groaned quietly to herself. _Why _hadn't the stupid Time Lord gone back to at least get some semblance of protection before he'd gone _swimming _in a pool of sentient water that was very patiently trying to kill them?

Steeling herself, her concern for him impossibly increased, she flicked the screwdriver on and started to descend. The water dissolved away from the operational end of the device, forming a conelike structure of perfectly breathable air; she wouldn't be able to walk completely unhindered, as she would have liked, but at the very least she wouldn't suffocate. Quickly, she threw up some mental shields; she doubted they'd be able to get into her head again without her noticing and being able to stop them again, but there was no sense in taking chances.

Slowly, she started to descend.

-BAD WOLF-

_Well, this is getting interesting. I do wish that the two of them—the Doctors, that is—didn't get into trouble at the same time, though. It's much easier when I can just look after one of them at a time, but the original Doctor decided to get possessed while Rose was drowning, and of course she—mortal, fragile creature that she is—took precedence. I almost lost him, which was disturbing._

_I do wish they'd never gotten separated in the first place. Things were so much simpler when I only had to deal with the Doctor and Rose in one universe, not the Doctor and Martha in one and his alternate and Rose in another, and when you add the fact that the other universe is trying very hard to accept my host as one of its own, it just makes it worse. I mean, of course Pete's World is going to try and incorporate her into its natural timeline; mistakes happen and I'm not always there to fix them. If things started fracturing every time someone relocated from one universe to another, we wouldn't have much of a multiverse left by now._

_But just this moment, it's really annoying. It's not like I can reason with the Time Vortex, especially not an alien one; it's not exactly alive, after all, even if it is extremely intelligent in many ways. The most I can do is try and block what it's doing and force it to do something else, but when a Vortex in a different reality is constantly trying to accept someone it really doesn't need to accept and I've got other things to worry about…_

_I do hope the alternate Doctor comes around soon. This is just getting troublesome._

-BAD WOLF-

It took Rose less time than she'd thought it would to get to the device, especially given the water's attempts to stop her. As she'd entered the room, the substance had changed colours again—not to imitate her Time Lord or any such illusion, simply to keep her from seeing anything; but they could do nothing more, what with the screwdriver protecting her. In the end, despite their best efforts, they'd been forced to uncover the corner of a decidedly suspicious-looking box; and, after a brief examination during which she utterly failed to uncover any other means of operating it, she cautiously reached out and touched the edge.

The effect was immediate. For a split second, brilliant while light blazed against her eyelids, too quickly for her to close her eyes against it; and then, just abruptly, it was over. She blinked for a few moments, more than a little stunned as she made sure that she still had all her body parts in the right places and they seemed to be working; once she was satisfied in that, she looked around.

Gone were the dark basement and its respective occupants. Instead, she was in a fairly unremarkable corridor—a little short for her liking, but otherwise not too bad. Oddly enough, the water was shallower here, perhaps two feet in depth; she wondered why that was, but decided that she had more important things to worry about. Things which were nowhere in sight, unfortunately.

"Doctor?" she called nervously. There was no reply from any kind of alien—or, indeed, anything at all—, so she tried again, a bit more loudly.

The water. It was alive, it could listen to her, it had somehow managed to speak to her.

She kicked it to get its attention and instantly felt stupid. "Where is he?" she demanded of it.

Silence.

"I'm warning you," she said. "I have got a sonic screwdriver and I think you know what happens when I turn it on, so I think it's better all around if you tell me where the Doctor is _right now_."

More silence.

She flicked the switch. The water flinched, then drained away from the high-pitched whine without a word.

Rose made a rather exasperated noise. She didn't exactly relish the idea of searching the entire… ship… station… wherever they were for him, but if it came to that, she would.

She was just about to start off in a random direction when a mind that was most certainly not her own slipped past her guard and entered her consciousness.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor had assumed that they would just crush him to death and be done with it (not that that would stop him for long, but he didn't particularly want to have to regenerate today, thank you very much) after his escape attempt, but they seemed to be sticking to the plan. He supposed that since the pressure needed to hurt him properly was painful to them as well, it would be used only as a last resort; but still, he found it slightly strange. Why did _nothing _ever just try to kill him quickly when they had the chance? Not that he was complaining, but even the Daleks had followed the inexplicable habit of letting him walk around right in front of them without even trying to shoot until it was too late.

As he was being dragged along, contemplating the behaviour of people trying to murder him, Rose teleported onto the ship; and just a few moments later her voice reached his ears. Any other creature would have been totally incapable of hearing her, of course. It would have been nigh impossible even for him, had the water not just happened to be pulling him down a hall just a corridor away from his companion. But as it was, his superior senses caught the familiar cadence of her voice, just at the edge of his hearing.

There was no way he could reply verbally, of course; even if the liquid would have let him have the use of his mouth, her human ears wouldn't have been able to pick up his call. So, he decided grimly, there was only one thing for it.

He let his mind spiral out beyond its confines. The wordless noise of the water's collective consciousness made him wince, and almost let him ignore the cold silence where his species had once quietly disapproved of him. Concentrating, he ignored both the telepathic cacophony and its absence, and tried to find the one mind on the ship whose flavour was familiar to him. Her voice had been coming from… ah, there she was. Shielded, of course—quite well, actually—, but it should be easy to slip past it for long enough to convince her of his identity. Of course, he could just save a lot of time and break past the barrier altogether, but such a process would be painful no matter how gently he attempted it; and as soon as the information appeared in his brain, he threw it away as viciously as he could.

He could never, ever consciously hurt her. He'd die first.

Then why wasn't he taking her home, where she belonged—

For a moment, he frowned. Home? What?

Never mind. He had more important things to think about just now; he could wonder about rogue thoughts that made no sense later.

Carefully, he circled around the golden glory that was her mind, trying to find a crack he could slip through for the half-second he needed. She was good—it took him a few moments—but not quite good enough to keep him away; and in short order, their consciousnesses were close enough to touch.

As soon as she felt it, she lashed out; he flinched, but forced himself to stay where he was. _Rose, it's me._

She stilled, stopped her onslaught, but didn't lower the barriers; she didn't trust him. The water had already—

She killed the stray thought before it had a chance to get any farther.

_Honestly. It's okay, look. _Ignoring his instincts to run and hide, he let his own defences slip a fraction, letting her see. He felt her tense, then peek inside cautiously. _You know they can't fake something like this._

She stepped inside his mind, and he shivered instinctively.

Quietly, he spoke again. _It's me, Rose. It's the Doctor._

For one brief, terrifying second, nothing happened. And then, abruptly, all her shields blasted themselves into nothingness; her consciousness reached for his, colliding with his in something he could only describe as a mental hug, her thoughts racing faster than any human's had a right to.

_Are you alright? Where are you? Have they done anything? Are you daft, leaving your sonic screwdriver with me when you—_

He felt himself bump into a wall and stay there, and then heard a door hiss closed. The temperature started, inevitably, to drop.

_Haven't got time_, he informed her. _Lock on to my mind and follow that. I don't know how cold it's going to get in here, so just to be safe I'm going to go into a healing trance._

There was silence for a few moments. _You're hurt?_ she inquired, mental voice dark.

_…Just a bit._

Anger.

_You can yell at me later,_ he said impatiently; and then, abruptly cutting short all his mental processes except the smallest of links to his companion, he sank into the back of his mind and went to sleep.

-BAD WOLF-

As his thoughts went dead, Rose panicked for a moment. She knew about his species' healing methods, including the ones less drastic than regeneration—she'd forced her first Doctor to tell her everything of the sort he could think of, after she'd watched him die without knowing that he was actually sort-of still alive—, but all the same, she worried. How badly was he hurt? Was he okay? Would the trance be enough to save him from his injuries?

Would it be enough to save him from the freezing process?

She closed her eyes, forcing herself to focus. His mind wasn't entirely silent to her; there was still a connection, the barest tendril of thought connecting them. She needed to follow it to him; she needed to save him, and then she could worry about exactly how angry she needed to be with him for leaving his only weapon with her.

She turned around and started to walk in his general direction, hoping that the halls weren't as twisty as she suspected they were. As it turned out, they weren't; and navigating the corridors was a suspiciously straightforward process. There were even signs helpfully pointing to the cellblock, which she rather suspected was a logical place to trap a Time Lord. And if it was one of those places with cryogenic cells…

Rose glared at the water. "You'd better not be trying to trick me again," she said to it. Unsurprisingly, it made no answer besides a faint ripple.

She went on, stepping through a doorway that was labelled as the entrance to the mini-prison. There were perhaps fifteen rooms there, each just barely big enough to fit an average biped. Experimentally, she poked her head in and looked around; there was only the faintest hiss of machinery to warn her before the door started closing, and reflex jerked her out of the cell just before it slammed shut. She watched, alarmed, as something hummed menacingly in the ceiling, and the door was quite abruptly frozen from the inside; little bits of ice traced interesting patterns across the transparent material in half a second, and then there was silence.

Well, she thought, whoever had built this ship certainly didn't want anyone escaping the cellblock. Uncomfortably, she wondered just how bad the offence had to be before one was sent here; but it didn't particularly matter now, did it? What did matter was that, unless the water was a lot better at illusions than she thought it was, this wasn't a trick. Which meant… the cell just over there, the only other one that was closed, contained the Doctor.

She ran over, the link between them pulsing more strongly with every step she took—and there he was. Impossibly silent, impossibly still, eyes shut, kept fixed in place in a block of ice.

Her breath stopped for a moment; tentatively, she reached out, touching her fingers to the part of the door closest to his hand. The cold gnawed through the clear substance and into her skin, and she hissed, withdrawing.

"Right," she said. First things first. She pressed the screwdriver to the surface and prepared to flick the switch. She'd no idea how she'd get him out of there once he was unfrozen, but she supposed he could explain that himself.

She was interrupted before she even had a chance to turn the device on.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," a pleasant voice said over the intercom.

-BAD WOLF-

And… yeah. That's it, really. Woohoo!

I am terribly sorry this came _two _days late. Originally, I had this lovely and wonderful plan for all of this, but it kind of… went… boom. Of course, it didn't help that 1 May was a Saturday, and therefore technically an Update Day—I tried to get this done by then, I really did, but SS took precedence. Sorry, guys. But… but I updated! See? :D

I have two things I am now going to ask you. ONE: Which Doctor are you currently supporting? I know how this ends, obviously, but I know that even if I changed my mind… Well, basically, at this point, however I end series 1, some of you are going to be mad at me. Unless I use plot devices I swore long ago never to use. So… yeah. I just want to know how hard I have to work to get as many of you as possible over to the side of the Doctor I have chosen. TWO: What monster would you like to have show up in the series 2 finale? I have the series 3 arc planned out already and, obviously, this one as well, but not series 2. It's quite annoying. So, anyway, if you could tell me what you'd like to see (as long as they are not currently locked in the Time War)… that'd be great.

Also, everyone praise I-Can-Spell-Confusion-With-A-K most highly for the epicsauce trailer, THE LINK TO WHICH IS ON MY PROFILE.

Love you all. Be well! See you next... weekend. XD


	23. Drowning, part III

I just want you all to know that I find it intensely amusing that I have actually already given you enough foreshadowing to figure out the end of this fic and, as far as I know, none of you noticed. –grins-

SIAPNIAN: I've been putting this up on the Livejournal as well. Why? …no reason. I just felt like it. It's actually kind of fun! The Episode Guide does have titles of future episodes, though, if you're curious.

**Disclaimer:** I am so very sick of that word. Even sicker of having to tell you that I have nothing official to do with DW. Rawr.

**WARNING: **I… can't quite remember how Gallifreyan healing whatnots work. I recall bits from my old research on the subject and other bits from canonically-accurate fanfics, so I _think_ I've got it right. If I haven't, tell me and I will fix it. If I can't fix it… ah… it's because he's from a parallel species of Time Lords… whose biology works differently. Okay? Good.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by the excellent TheDisturbedPoet, who is the perpetrator of some very amusing crossovers. You should look at them!

-BAD WOLF-

Of all the things Rose could have possibly expected out of the ship and its inhabitants, it certainly hadn't been speech. The water, in fact, hadn't said a word to her since it had created the false Doctor; somehow, she hadn't thought it would do it again.

Unless that wasn't what was speaking to her.

Either way, it was trying to stop her from freeing the Doctor. She straightened up and glared at something in the corner that she sincerely hoped was a camera. "Oh?" she inquired. "Why's that, then?"

The voice almost seemed amused. "The glass is soundproof. Can't have prisoners talking to each other, you know."

"What kind of ship _is _this?" She stared at the cells, disturbed anew.

"The captain was… somewhat paranoid."

Was. The past tense made her wince.

"That's partially why we chose this one," the voice continued. "We didn't want people like you coming in and messing things up. Sonic devices are hardly unique nowadays, you know."

"What do you suggest I do, then? 'Cause I'm not just going to sit here and do nothing." She crossed her arms and tried to look threatening. She was getting surprisingly good at it now—if there was actually anything to look threatening _at_. As it was, she was looking at what may or may not have been a camera, which made things a bit more difficult.

"We would suggest that you come to the bridge."

"And where's that?"

The water shifted, forming a pillar that wobbled at her for a bit before it started to glide smoothly out of the room.

Rose hesitated for a moment, considering, glancing fearfully back at the Doctor. He wasn't going anywhere, she decided at last; loath though she was to leave him in his helpless state, there was little she could do for him here. On the bridge, though… She might be able to think of something. Those sorts of places traditionally controlled the rest of the ship, after all, and that would presumably include the cellblock. And it wasn't as if the water could do much to hurt her, what with the sonic screwdriver.

At any rate, the odds were better than they would be if she just sat there and did nothing; so she turned away from the Time Lord, biting her lip a bit, and followed the asymmetrical lump of liquid out of the room.

-BAD WOLF-

_Why does that man insist on running off and doing unexpected things that I do not at all like? I understand his logic in initiating a mental link, of course—I approve of it—but that didn't mean he had to get all… touchy-feely about it. Well, to be more accurate, she was the one doing the telepathic hugging. But that doesn't mean he was allowed to like it!_

_Okay. Maybe I am overreacting. A little. But I have reason to. The longer he keeps her, the less he'll want to let her go and the harder it will be to get him to relinquish her when the time comes. Because the time _will _come, even if I have to tear both universes apart to get him to understand._

_Maybe once I've gotten them both out of this one, I'll throw them somewhere that will remind him why she can't stay with him. Although… He's so deep in denial now he doesn't even seem to comprehend that she doesn't belong there in the first place._

_That Time Lord is far too good at tricking himself when I don't want him to._

_Wherever I'm sending them next won't matter if I don't get them out of this first, I know, but… I'm allowed to be worried, aren't I? I had a plan, you know. It was quite a good plan. I liked it very much, and if those stupid Doctors would stop moping for long enough to think about it, they'd probably like it too. Wait. No. They would. My Doctor would have Rose, and the other one would never know that he was missing out on anything in the first place._

_Why did it have to get this complicated again?_

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was getting intensely sick of wet socks and not being in control of things by the time she got to the bridge. She was also not particularly enjoying the lack of anything to talk to; she could handle any kind of alien one could throw at her as long as it _looked_ alive. Things that were normally inanimate, though…

The door slid shut behind her with a not-reassuring-at-all _snick_ sound and she searched eagerly for anything sentient that she wouldn't drink by mistake if left in a cup; but such a creature was not to be found. Disappointed, she regarded her surroundings instead. There was very little that was interesting—it was all very grey and angular, clearly built for shorter species, with pale blue screens and black keyboards in helpful places. There was a chair in front of the largest screen and most impressive keyboard, which was where she assumed the erstwhile captain would have sat had he been alive. Altogether very normal, except for the two feet of water flooding the entire room.

She wished there was something sentient-looking to talk to.

"Sorry," came the pleasant voice. "I forgot about you humans and your xenophobic tendencies." Abruptly, a section of water at the other end of the room coalesced, rising and moulding itself into a vaguely female shape. The shape solidified, and although it retained the transparency of the liquid that formed it, Rose was startled and disturbed to note that it was a near-perfect copy of herself.

She then realised that she must have left her mind unguarded, as that was the only way the stuff could have realised her discomfiture at its natural form; and she slammed all her mental doors shut as quickly as possible, glaring suspiciously at the substance.

"I'm not xenophobic," Rose muttered half-heartedly, trying to look at the floor before she realised that it was covered in the very creatures she was trying not to see.

"Mm, true," the copy commented. Although the water had stolen her appearance, it had maintained the voice it had initially adopted; and the dissonance was unnerving. "I suppose you couldn't be, considering the fact that you appear to be in love with an alien at the moment. Albeit a very human-looking alien, so perhaps that doesn't prove your point as well as you might like."

"He doesn't look human," she corrected instinctively. "His kind were there first, they look like him."

The water-Rose looked amused. "Be that as it may, you should probably be a little more careful guarding your thoughts, dear. We've had an interesting trek through your subconscious. You're quite the conflicted creature, aren't you?"

"What?"

A laugh. "Never mind. As much as I would love to discuss your little tangle of hormones, we unfortunately have more important things at hand."

Perversely, she was slightly disappointed. "We do," she assented. "So. You've been in my head, you know what I want to ask you."

The water actually seemed pleased at her affected nonchalance towards the invasion. "Quite," it said. "Well. Where to begin?"

Surreptitiously, she started to look around the room for anything that could help the Doctor. "Why are you invading Earth?"

"Oh, that's easy. There's water on it."

Rose frowned a bit at that. "I thought you _were _water."

"In a way. We are microscopic creatures; we bond to it, and take it wherever we go."

"And you need more of it?" She took note of something that looked suspiciously like the input for the intercom near the captain's chair.

"Of course. Our numbers have grown too much."

She made sure her telepathic barriers were sound and started to pace, attempting to get near the intercom without the water noticing. If she could play the screwdriver's signal over the speakers… if it agitated the frozen liquid enough to… But what if it didn't? What if it couldn't hear it in that state? Wait, wait, wait. That didn't matter. She'd have to thaw out the chamber anyway, just to get it to open in the first place. Where were the controls for that, anyway?

"Did you try Neptune?" she inquired instead, flopping into the captain's chair and spinning it to face the creatures mimicking her.

It—they—snorted. "Don't be silly," they admonished her. "We already went there."

"And?"

"Overpopulated it. We don't die very easily, you see. Sorry to disappoint."

Rose rotated the chair absently from side to side. "We weren't going to kill you," she said. "Unless there was no other choice."

"Oh, and we all know how well _that _works out. More chaos and death follow the Doctor than most armies."

She bristled at that. "That's not his fault," she snapped.

"Really? Seems like an awful lot of coincidences."

They were trying to make her angry. She wasn't sure why, but she did know that whatever reason they had couldn't be good, so she did her best to ignore the sudden wave of violent thoughts towards the liquid.

"You know there are rules against invading Earth, though, yeah?" she asked instead. "If you went through the trouble of hijacking an interstellar ship, why not just go somewhere uninhabited?"

"The ship was taken from orbit around Neptune," the water-Rose explained, as if to a particularly stupid child. "Earth was the closest one that seemed worth our time."

"But if you'd just gone somewhere else, we wouldn't even be here, trying to stop you," she objected, leaning forward, gesturing lightly with the hand not holding the screwdriver. "Wouldn't that be easier?"

The copy's features went still, foregoing even the semblance of normal emotion; her voice darkened. "You don't understand what it's like for us," it hissed. "We're not meant to be this close together. Every second sharing the same molecule of water is a torment. Our minds are _too _close, _too _meshed, and it _hurts_."

Rose was silent.

"The more we are in contact with each other, the worse it gets, until there is no more space between one consciousness and another. We're meant to merge, of course, but only to a point—and we passed that long ago." There was a long, shuddering pause. "What would you have done?"

She inhaled. "There are people dying down there because of you."

Abruptly, the solemn mood was gone; the copy abruptly straightened, smiling a little. "I wish that I could say I'm sorry about that," it said brightly.

-BAD WOLF-

Hidden deep within his instinctive trance, the Doctor worried. Rose was out there, somewhere, safe—he had to believe that, even if he couldn't feel her. He'd been comforted an undue amount by her human presence in his mind, even after he had drifted into his semi-unconsciousness; now that it was gone, it was all he could do not to snap out of his current state to try and look for her.

He told himself, very firmly, that she was probably just protecting herself from the water. Which was very wise, all things considered. But… if she felt the need to close herself off that securely, even shutting _him_ out, didn't that mean she was in danger? Wait. She was Rose Marion Tyler. She was _always _in danger.

That didn't help, he thought fretfully.

She was clever, and she was resourceful, and she'd managed to get through all their other adventures primarily unscathed. What had she said he'd—the other him, anyway—called her? Jeopardy friendly—that was it. And she was. He'd never seen a companion so singularly resistant to peril-related injury. Well, he supposed that was probably a good thing, considering just how much peril she usually found herself in; if she was any less resilient, she'd be dead several times over by now. Which just led back to the initial source of his worrying, which… wasn't helpful.

She was probably fine. She was clever, and she had the sonic screwdriver, and she wasn't locked in a cell and frozen, which meant that she was altogether in less danger than he was.

Still, though, there wasn't much else to think about; so he drifted inside his subconscious, watching the remains of their link in the faint hope that it would reawaken. If he lost her…

He wouldn't. He couldn't.

She wasn't his to lose, nudged a thought. He paused, perplexed; if she wasn't his, whose could she be? She was his companion, wasn't she? Where had that come from? What was going on? He'd had enough of things trying to root around his head without his permission; _what was that?_

There was no answer, and he finally gave up, deciding instead to start watching the broken telepathic connection again; if she needed him… well, he wasn't sure what he was able to do to help in this state. But he'd figure something out.

He always did.

-BAD WOLF-

_I am getting very, very tired of this. I know I'm starting to repeat myself now, but you mortal creatures cannot possibly fathom exactly how exhausting this is. I'm trying to manipulate both minds and events in two different universes and nobody even knows I'm doing it; that's bound to wear on the most patient of us, and I am most certainly not the most patient of anything. I just need one Doctor to figure out what's going on and then everything will be fine; he'll be able to find his parallel and sort everything out. But this Doctor is being deliberately oblivious and the other one won't even allow himself to hope for anything of the kind._

_It's not my fault his life thus far has been somewhat unfortunate. I could change that, if he'd listen to me, but no. Because, apparently, my name only meant something the first time he saw it. And every time I try and put a thought in his head, he just gets depressed and wanders off. Martha's not helping, of course. I'll probably have to replace her at some point… but not just yet. She could decide to be useful, maybe._

_As for Davros and his current lack of mischief… Well. I still can't figure that out, but I've decided to stop worrying about it for the time being; if anything untoward happens to the timeline, I'll be able to sense it before it does any real damage. I'll find out what happened later, when Rose is back where she belongs and everything is right with the world. Worlds. Whatever._

_I don't know why he's being so obtuse, really. It should be obvious that he has no claim on her. It should be obvious to her as well, but… I can't very well control her. That would be rude._

-BAD WOLF-

Enough of this, Rose thought fiercely. The Doctor was in danger, and it wasn't like the water could _do _anything to her as long as she had the screwdriver; she didn't have to keep up this pretence if she didn't want to. She'd learned enough.

She spun the chair around and started examining the controls, frowning absently at them, wishing yet again that she knew how to change the settings on the aforementioned device and be done with it.

"What are you doing?" the liquid inquired.

"I think," she replied, running her fingers across one of the screens in the hopes of stumbling across something of use, "it's time I got the Doctor out of there." She heard sloshing. "And you seem to be forgetting the fact that he left me his screwdriver, so attacking me isn't going to do any good."

The sound stopped. "How are you going to rescue him?" the water-Rose asked. "Even if you open the cell, we're still there, and can hold him just as well. It would be somewhat uncomfortable to remain in that position, but we can do it."

Finally, she found something of use. Not bothering to think of which cell he was in, she told the computer to defrost and unlock all of them; the brief whirr of power being reassigned indicated that it was following her orders. Satisfied, she glanced over her shoulder at her copy.

"I'm sitting next to an _intercom_," she explained.

The humanoid figure was motionless. A brief noise from the console informed her that the cells were open; checking quickly to make sure the system was still set to the correct room, she pressed the screwdriver to the input and switched it on.

She half-expected the water to start screaming, but no such noise was forthcoming; instead, it—seemingly with infinite calm—started streaming up her body again.

This was getting repetitive. She couldn't stop sonicking the intercom; there was no way to know if the Doctor was free yet—

—if he even knew she was saving him—

Was he aware of anything going on, in his current state?

She really should have thought this through a bit more, she decided; and as liquid drifted into her mouth yet again, she sought the remains of her severed link with the unconscious Time Lord.

_Help me._

-BAD WOLF-

Can you tell that I didn't have enough plot to make up the whole wordcount? I thought so. XD And I have even LESS plot for next week's wordcount! Isn't that fantastic? Rawr at two-parters! –flails helplessly-

Uhh… Can't really think of anything important to tell you this time, except the fact that I ALMOST managed to update on time (I had to go to bed before I could finish. Bleh.), happy Mother's Day, AND:

1. Watch the aforementioned trailer, if you haven't.

2. Which Doctor are you supporting? I'm keeping track, you see.

3. Any preference for series 2 enemies? Anything currently in the timelock is off-limits, so no Daleks (YAY!!!), no Time Lords, and no Nightmare Children; I kind of doubt any of you will mind that. :P But yeah. Thoughts? Or are you going to leave me to my own devices again? (The horror!)

Be well, everyone! I love you. As proof of this, I was initially going to put something very evil at the end of this A/N, but I resisted. SO THERE.


	24. Drowning, part IV

I _also _find it intensely amusing that so many of you started thinking way too hard about the aforementioned foreshadowing. XD Or just hard enough, depending on your viewpoint. ^_^ (Although, to be fair, one of the methods with which one could deduce the ending requires knowing me more than any of you probably do, and another one involves reading a book that has nothing to do with the fandom. O.o So Yeah. I mean, there's also enough of it without those, most likely, but…)

SIAPNIAN: There were requests for more fluff and more mind!hugs. So… you get both! :D …in fact, it's most of the chapter. Oops. Francesca's in a very fluffy mood right now.

**Disclaimer:** …sigh.

**Non-Warning: **All hail the mighty beta, TheDisturbedPoet!

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor awoke disoriented, the effects of his interrupted trance messing with every sense he had and making it nigh impossible not to curl up and slip back into it; but he _knew _with a desperation that seared his instincts into nonexistence that he needed to stay awake. He was right—Rose was in trouble. And now she was screaming—a wordless, soundless noise that ripped through his brain with her fear.

Unsteady, his head and most of the rest of him aching, he stumbled to his feet. Vaguely, he noticed the harsh buzz of the screwdriver pulsing through the intercom.

Well, he thought, that explained her panic—for panic he realised it was quickly becoming. She was using the screwdriver to rescue _him_, which meant…

The fog in his mind abruptly cleared, and he ran. The doors were still open to allow the water to escape the noise, thankfully, and try as it might it couldn't quite manage to trip him; that was good. He tried to catch Rose's mind again, to tell her not to be afraid, he was on his way; but he couldn't be heard. Apart from her natural terror (_where was he, he should be here, he promised, where was he_), there was a rogue element—a sick, swaying kind of influence lapping against her consciousness. He couldn't talk to her without tearing it away, and there was a risk of hurting her; so, instead, he tried to block out her emotions and use the connection to simply track her physical location.

It was harder than he would have liked; the flickering telepathic glow only gave him a direction to go in, not the way to her. However, despite a wrong turn or two, he managed to locate and enter the bridge before any serious damage had been done.

There she was—sitting in the captain's chair, screwdriver stubbornly pressed to the intercom despite the water's occasional attempts to remove it, her entire form wreathed in a shell of liquid, blocking out the air. Her eyes were closed; she wasn't bothering to struggle for breath now. The only sound coming from her barely-conscious mind was a faint, piteous kind of betrayal.

She didn't think he was coming.

He'd prove that wrong for her right now, he thought fiercely, striding over and trying to remove the screwdriver from her grasp. Even in this state, she put up a fight; and an unidentifiable emotion trickled through his hearts.

"Rose, it's me," he told her. "You can let go now."

-BAD WOLF-

She wasn't quite sure what to think about that. She _thought _she heard his voice; certainly, there was something trying to grab the device in question, but… The water could imitate things, and it certainly had been trying to stop her… but…

It didn't matter, in the end; she was in no condition to resist, and against her wavering will the screwdriver was pulled from her fingers. Exhausted and barely conscious, she let herself relax. Either the Doctor hadn't awakened, or somehow she hadn't managed to rescue him after all, or he wasn't coming—

Every fibre of her being that still had the capability of independent thought rebelled. Of _course _he was coming, he always did, he always would, he promised—

The other him had promised. Had this one? Or had she just gone along with him and assumed she meant something and—_no_, that _wasn't her, damn it, _that was the water in her head, it was playing with her thoughts and was that buzzing?

It was. And not just any buzzing; with the advent of the noise, the influence in her mind flinched in pain and started to retreat. Liquid slid from her skin, splashing to the floor, crawling away from her lungs. That was something, at least. She couldn't quite remember how to breathe, but if the knowledge decided to return to her, she'd be able to do it.

"Rose?"

The water was gone, its influence passed; either she was hallucinating on her own, or… She forced herself to open her eyes, narrowing them as she tried to focus. "Doctor?"

"Okay. You're okay. That's…. That's good. Excellent. Good." He exhaled, and the reassuringly brown blur that could only be him shifted, straightening.

Well, it _sounded_ like him… She forced her diaphragm to move, and spent the following few moments attempting to replenish her oxygen supply; even if this was some kind of trick, still, she wasn't going to turn down a chance to breathe. There were other things to attend to, though, and as soon as she felt herself beyond the immediate danger of passing out she blinked up at him again, using the chair to support herself as she stood.

He looked very much like himself—exactly like himself, in fact; brown eyes dark with concern, a faint frown on his lips as he looked at her, not a freckle out of place—, but she knew what the liquid could do when it wanted to, and she didn't want to risk anything. She, of all people, knew how terrible false hope could be when it grabbed hold.

"It's really you, yeah?" she asked him.

He nodded. "It's really me."

Hesitantly, she reached up, hand hovering just above his cheek for a moment before she dared to touch him. He looked a little confused, but didn't try to stop her; and, subtly reassured by that detail, she pressed her fingers against his face. His skin was slightly cooler than hers, just as she remembered; and it was definitely substantial—no water to be found. To be absolutely sure (and, privately, driven by the need to touch him, to acknowledge in an undeniable way that he was really there, he had really come back), she dropped her hand down to rest her palm flat against his chest. His double heartbeat pulsed reassuringly at her, and she wobbled slightly. She wasn't sure if it was her imagination or not, but the gentle four-beat rhythm seemed to speed up as she monitored it.

She felt him nudge against her mind, the connection muted under the water's influence; she lashed out at it with a deft flick. As it recoiled, she telepathically reached for the Doctor, hiding in the protection of his thoughts. She noticed that the creatures decided not to attack again, opting instead to retreat entirely, before she was engulfed in the sheer _complexity_ of the Time Lord whose mind she was currently inhabiting. She hadn't seen much of it the last time, and had been concentrating a bit more on trying to make sure neither of them died; now that she was actually paying attention… Most of the doors were closed and it was _still _overwhelming.

Rose suddenly felt very, very small.

_Never_, he thought fiercely—and, simultaneously, _Sorry_. As those were the only thoughts aimed towards her in particular, she decided to ignore the ones about rice pudding and where the swimming pool had wandered off to, along with the other ones that were going by too quickly for her to read.

And, suddenly, the rush of mental noise started to dissipate; the remaining doors started to close—but instead of feeling relieved (which she probably should have), something deep within her _reacted_. She didn't tell him to stop; she didn't need to. For a moment, he stilled, and then he cautiously removed the barriers he had just created, hesitating to make sure she wouldn't run screaming—

What? Why would she do that?

A jolt of ineffable sadness stabbed through him and, therefore, her. _You'll find a reason. One day._

No. Never. She'd already been pulled from him once; she wouldn't let it happen again.

He didn't push the subject, but they both knew he didn't believe her; instead, his consciousness flitted gently around hers, checking for damage. Her breath jerked in her throat at the scrutiny. Once he was satisfied that no permanent harm was done, he mentally retreated to a more comfortable distance and dropped his forehead to rest against hers. Rose thought, somewhere in the back of her mind, that there was something faintly odd about that, but she was so wrapped up on the contact itself—both mental and physical—that she didn't examine it. She'd think about it later, she decided. Right now…

"You alright?" he asked her, even though he technically already knew.

She nodded and moved, taking the half-step that lay between them, and hugged him properly. He flinched, pain flashing briefly in his mind, and she jolted away.

"Are you?" she inquired, narrowing her eyes at him.

The notion of lying flickered through his thoughts before he realised that she could see them. She might have to figure out a way to make this permanent; this could prove almost infinitely useful.

She blushed a bit then, although she wouldn't let herself know why.

"I will be," he replied, gallantly pretending not to have noticed.

The water-Rose cleared its throat gently, providing a much-needed distraction. The Doctor and his companion simultaneously turned to face it, and Rose noticed that the Time Lord seemed just slightly unsteady. Hardly enough to notice, but considering the subtle grace with which he usually moved…

_I'm fine,_ he muttered sulkily.

"Yes," he said. "Sorry. Just had to make sure you didn't hurt my…" His thoughts stuttered over the word "companion"—so he _did _think before he spoke, if only just. How strange. "Didn't hurt Rose," he corrected. "Which you did. Not enough to be worrying, mind you, just enough to make me _very _not happy with you, so I think it would be in your best interest at the moment to tell me what you're doing and subsequently stop it."

If the water was going to answer, it never even managed to get the first syllable out before Rose interrupted.

"They're tiny creatures who bond to water and have an empathic field connecting them all. These ones came from Neptune, which was subsequently overcrowded, which made them freak out because they lost their individuality. They hijacked a spaceship and invaded Earth 'cause it was closest, and they either don't know or don't care about the trouble they're getting into by relocating to an inhabited planet."

He blinked at her for a moment. "You've been busy."

She shrugged. "Someone had to. You aren't much good frozen, you know that?" She gave him a brilliant grin, tongue between her teeth.

"Not that this isn't cute to watch," the water interrupted, "because it is, there is the small matter of you trying to stop us from saving ourselves from excruciating mental torment."

The Doctor pulled absently at his ear. "There is that, isn't it?"

"We can't let you do that."

Instinctively, Rose inched closer to him. She knew, logically, that there was really nothing to be worried about; she'd already managed to face them alone with tolerable success (sometimes), but she hadn't had a choice then. Now that she did, she'd rather be next to him, so she'd know she'd be safe.

He reached out, took her hand. She was quietly annoyed at herself for not keeping better track of her thoughts, but it had been a while since she'd willingly let someone into her mind for this long.

Had her original Doctor ever done this? She couldn't remember. And why had that prompted the current one to take one of the newer flickers of thought and shove it firmly behind several doors?

-BAD WOLF-

_The longer I watch those two, the more I just want to show up myself and tell them off. That Doctor should know by now that he is not allowed to start thinking that way, and Rose definitely shouldn't be thinking of him as hers. Even if he sort of is. Or will be, if he keeps on thinking like this…_

_He must know that he's doing something wrong by now. He is feeling jealous of the other Doctor, which means that he definitely recognises their attachment and his importance… Whether I can translate that acknowledgement into guilt for keeping them apart is another matter, although judging by past events I fear that it'll slip straight into the opposite._

_This whole transuniversal thing is far more trouble than it's worth. As if saving their lives every five seconds isn't enough (and does Rose _like _getting drowned? She certainly seems to be doing a lot of it), I'm having to manipulate their emotions… And that's ignoring the first Doctor and the kind of trouble he's being. Impossible, indeed…_

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor valiantly ignored the flash of totally-illogical jealousy that had briefly run through him, along with his companion's confusion at the same, and focussed on the fact that he still hadn't taken care of the current aliens trying to invade yet.

"You _could_," he said. "If you really, really wanted to, you could."

"We don't."

"Well…" He tried to think of something clever to put at the end of that sentence, but failed. He was inclined to blame Rose's continuing, quiet presence in his mind; it was more distracting than he'd initially bargained for. Considering he had initially bargained for it being very distracting indeed, that was impressive. "That's unfortunate."

"It depends on your viewpoint," the water said calmly, and collapsed, unceremoniously splashing into its brethren.

"That was rude," the Doctor said.

Whatever reply Rose was going to make—judging by the turn of her thoughts, it was probably a jab at his hypocrisy—was lost; as soon as she opened her mouth, the lights flickered, dimming, and the faint hum of power throughout the ship stuttered in a thoroughly alarming manner.

"That's not good, is it?" she inquired instead.

"Um… no." He looked around, trying to think. The water was trying to cut the power, which was about twenty different species of bad, depending on how the ship worked. One definite way it would not end well involved the orbit; it didn't feel particularly stable to him, and if the engines stopped working… Either they would crash into something or float randomly through space for a while and _then _crash into something, neither of which was in his plans at the time. There hadn't been a secondary, portable teleport inside the ship, which meant that that depended on the power as well, which meant he had to stop thinking about exactly how bad things could get and start trying to fix them.

-BAD WOLF-

Quite abruptly, the Doctor let go of her hand and whirled to start fiddling with the console. "Get out of the water," he told her.

Rose blinked at him. "What?"

"They've stopped talking to us while trying to kill us and are now just trying to kill us. I wouldn't put it past them, at this point, to figure out how to electrify themselves. If they manage it, I'll be fine—"

"Liar," she muttered at him.

He gave her a look. "Technically," he said, "not dead is still fine. And if I'm going to be able to fix this at all, I need to be able to move around the room." To prove his point, he walked to another console and stared at it.

"So I just sit here and watch you get electrocuted?" she asked, bristling a bit.

"Rose," he said, very patiently, "you just saved me from a particular type of death that would be difficult for _me _to get out of. No one's going to question your adequacy after that."

"There has to be something I can do to help." She hated feeling useless.

He came back, looking her in the eye with a desperate kind of urgency. "You can help," he said, "by not getting yourself killed. And if you sit there—" he indicated the captain's chair—"you can… help me… do whatever it is that I'm trying to do."

_You don't know yet? _Rose thought, somewhat incredulously.

_I'm working on it, _he returned testily.

Her lips twitched at the switch from verbal to telepathic communication, and felt her amusement briefly mirrored in his consciousness. She could get used to this, if only to figure out where he had gone the next time he wandered off…

_I'm not the one who wanders off_.

"You so are," she informed him, grinning.

"A subject that I would love to discuss later," he said lightly. "Maybe after we're not being attacked by sentient, telepathic puddles who may or may not be trying to electrify themselves at this very moment? Speaking of…" And, before she had a chance to react, he had easily picked her up, depositing her firmly on the captain's chair before she could do more than yelp. "Stay there," he said, "and press that button when I tell you."

She regarded the button for a moment. It was large and reassuringly blue. "Okay," she said, deciding that button-pushing was about as helpful as she was going to be allowed to be.

"That, I will have you know, is a very important button. Can't do anything without it. Quite literally, in fact." He grinned for a moment before sobering. "I'm… going to have to terminate the telepathic link, by the way."

She stared at him. "Why?" she asked, without thinking about it. She flinched then, wondering vaguely why she had rebelled against the idea so thoroughly.

He winced. "Well… Let's just say that if I don't, it will sever itself. And not in a particularly pleasant way."

She didn't like it.

_I know_.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he repeated, and after a faint brush of his mind to hers that flooded her with warmth, the connection went dead. She blinked, disoriented, suddenly unsure of what to do with herself.

He whirled away and started dismantling a console, briefly using the screwdriver to loosen it before pulling the front away, revealing the tangled mess of wires beneath. She turned in the chair, shifting so she sat cross-legged. She watched the water suspiciously, but it didn't move.

Perversely, that worried her more than an attack.

The screen flickered warningly, the power fluctuating in a manner that was not at all reassuring, and she swallowed. "Doctor?"

"I know," he said, sloshing over to the other side of the room to rip a second console apart. "I'm almost there."

She bit her lip and waited. A tense minute or so passed, punctuated only by splashing, the low buzz of the screwdriver and occasional curses in a dead language.

"Okay," the Time Lord said. "I think that should be it."

"Press the button?" she hazarded.

There was a hesitation that she did not at all like. "We can try it, at least."

"Thanks," she muttered. "I feel so much better now."

She pressed the button.

The lights went out.

-BAD WOLF-

Can you tell I ran out of plot again? Yeah. .

I'm really, really, really sorry this is so late. Really. Staying up for thirty-six hours evidently does not help me write. In apology, I'm making an alteration to the update schedule; you know those ridiculously short chapters that happen at the beginning of the episode? Once I run across those, I'll upload that sometime in the week before its successor is due. Because really, it's kind of silly to have an entire week set apart for them.

And I find it amusing that the Weeping Angels are _less _scary to me now that they have Aweshum New Powarz. How does that work? XD

Sorry again. –meek look- Really.


	25. Drowning, part V

Hello again! I really should be studying. But I'm not. MWAHAHA.

**Disclaimer:** My ninjas have failed me, so… no. :/

SIAPNIAN: I'm not sure if I've said this before or not, but I shall say it again: I really, honestly have _no _idea how you got past the first few chapters. –cringes- Not that these ones are much better, but… still. Agh. (Speaking of, I apologise for the last one. I don't think it made very much sense.)

**Non-Warning: **Betaed by Aelita Madeline.

-BAD WOLF-

For exactly five seconds, neither one breathed. When nothing immediately life-threatening occurred, respiration resumed its normal routine.

"The monitors are still on," Rose said, confused.

"Yes," the Doctor replied. "Which means… they only cut out the lights. Why did they do that first? Why not just take the whole system out?"

"Maybe it was just the first thing they came across," she suggested, looking at the ground in a worried fashion.

"Maybe. Or maybe they were trying something else." He glanced at her. "You can get up now, if you want. They can't move."

She did so, and was reassured by the lack of resistance the substance showed. She decided she wasn't swimming for a very long time after this. "What did you do?"

"The reason they can move in unison is because they're all telepathically connected," he explained. "I hacked into the ship and told it to broadcast a specific, anti-telepathic frequency inside itself. Severed the connection. They can move, just… not together."

"And even if they could," Rose realised, "they wouldn't."

He nodded slowly, the motion barely visible in the half-light from the torn-apart console.

"So that's it, then?" she inquired, starting to make her way across the bridge to him. Her heart was still thudding unevenly from the events of the previous few minutes, and it was with a kind of ineffable relief that she finally curled her fingers around his. He was here, he was holding her hand, and everything would therefore be alright.

"Almost," he said, squeezing her hand lightly and walking with her to the console she had just abandoned. Deftly manipulating the controls with his free hand, he continued to speak. "I'm just going to set a course for the nearest uninhabited water planet, reverse the teleport…" He smiled briefly at her before returning his eyes to his work. "And then we can go home."

"We're not leaving until my mum sees you, you know," she said, grinning a bit.

"Do we have to?"

Rose wondered if he knew how profoundly whiny he sounded, and decided he probably didn't. "She makes a point of inspecting all the Time Lords I run off with," she replied with mock solemnity.

"You make a habit of this?"

"Only with you," she said instantly, and startled herself. "Well… you and… other you. You know."

He raised an eyebrow at her, amusement mixed with something she couldn't name, and she bit her lip. She hadn't meant to lump them both in with each other. Technically, they were the same person, but…

She felt unaccountably guilty, and then confused, and then somehow both, and decided not to think about it anymore. She was travelling with this Doctor; the other one was… very far away, and unlikely to come back for her. Never to come back for her, actually. Impossible usually wasn't for him, but she had the nagging suspicion that just this once, there was no way.

Unless this Doctor knew something—_no._ He wouldn't. There was no need to get her hopes up about that, and there was also no need to make him feel like she was travelling with him only because of some vague chance that he could get her back to her original universe. That was just rude.

Besides, she told herself firmly (and not for the first time), if he'd known of a way to get her back, he would have before he even asked her to come with him. There was no telling what kind of damage a non-native could do to a universe while time-travelling through it. He wouldn't have asked her if…

Well. He might have. But he _wouldn't _have asked her to come with him if he could have just returned her to where she came from. That made absolutely no sense.

Besides, she wasn't supposed to be thinking about this in the first place. It made her feel distinctly odd. It wasn't as if she was betraying her original Doctor…

"And now," said the Time Lord in question, blissfully unaware of the chaos of her thoughts, "we have about five minutes before we're out of teleport range, so I suggest we run before we get stuck here for all eternity. What do you think?"

She nodded. "Sounds like a plan," she replied.

Unfortunately, the plan was slightly harder than expected to carry out; while visibility had been minimal on the bridge, it was practically nonexistent in the corridor.

"I don't suppose you've got a light or something?" Rose inquired hopefully.

"I gave it to you," he said, startled.

She thought for a moment. "I dropped it," she said sheepishly. She had also, she realised, dropped the other one when she teleported; a horrific oversight on her part (or, rather, two), but she _had _been distracted.

"Humans," he muttered good-naturedly. "Can't trust you with anything."

"I wasn't the one who nearly got himself killed because he left the screwdriver with the person they weren't even attacking," she said.

"And," he retorted, "I wasn't the one who didn't chase all the water off the bridge before attempting to rescue the person who wasn't going anywhere without them having the controls."

She stuttered for a few moments. "I wasn't exactly thinking about what they were going to do to me at the time," she finally managed to say. "Considering that you were kind of in mortal danger at the moment and you're… And besides, none of that would have happened if you'd just taken the screwdriver with you in the first place," she finished, somewhat snappishly.

"Technicality," he muttered back. "For future reference, though," he continued, pausing for a moment before picking a direction, "you are more mortal than I am. It's slightly more important for you to be out of danger than me."

She glared at him. "I'd rather you not have to regenerate again, though," she informed him, "if I had a chance to stop it."

"And I'd rather regenerate than have you killed for my sake."

She didn't reply to that; she wasn't entirely sure how. "You know where we're going, right?" she said instead.

"Yes."

"You can see in this?" She gestured vaguely to the dark surrounding them. She couldn't even see her own movement; were it not for his hand still holding hers, she would be completely lost by this point.

"There are other senses than sight, you know," he said a bit testily. "Who says I'm not using one of them?"

"Right. And are these 'other senses' that are magically letting you retain your sense of direction while wandering around a dark, abandoned spaceship available to humans?"

A pause. "No."

She smiled. His grip on her shifted as he crouched briefly to retrieve something from the floor.

"But that's not the point," he said. "The point is this." And, quite suddenly, with a deft flick of his wrist, he pulled her off-course; she collided haphazardly with his side as he let go of her hand and put an arm around her shoulders, folding her against his chest.

She blinked.

"Hold on," he explained. "Once I reverse the teleport network, this entire place will flood." A pause. "More than it already is, anyway. And I'd rather we not get separated."

"Right," she said, hesitantly, and awkwardly shifted so her hands were clasped behind his back. His jacket was slightly rough against her cheek, the faint honey-ish aroma she'd learned to associate with him there despite his current damp state. There was, she told herself, absolutely no reason for the sudden flash of warmth that jarred her skin—oh, sod it. There was every reason for it.

His narrow chest jerked slightly as he inhaled. "Ready?" he asked her.

She swallowed. "Yeah."

There was a brief buzz from the screwdriver, and the world exploded.

-BAD WOLF-

_Fantastic. That is just… fantastic. Really. As if it wasn't bad enough that that stupid Doctor is developing exactly the same kind of infatuation with her that his predecessor did, I have to somehow stop her from doing the same? I tried telling her, I did, and she just… She didn't listen to me. Me. Of all the people not to listen to, of course you would choose the one person you know who happens to be able to see (and control) the entirety of time and space!_

_Yes, I know he's technically a Doctor. Yes, I know she's Rose and therefore susceptible to Time Lords. But this… this… This is ridiculous. He won't let her go until the universe shatters around him and she's just fine with that and won't even… She could at least ask! It's not like he would pretend not to know._

_…right?_

_Gah. Whatever. If he refuses to see the kind of damage he's doing, I'll make him see it. Sometimes even Time Lords need to be reminded of what happens when you try and force a universe to accept someone who doesn't belong there._

_And if he doesn't listen to that… well. I'll just have to be a bit more drastic. But one way or another, I will make him understand._

_Or shatter the universes trying. But let's hope it doesn't come to that, shall we?_

-BAD WOLF-

It was slightly disorienting, suddenly being thoroughly underwater when there had previously been nothing of that magnitude on the entire ship. He had hoped that the transfer would be a bit slower, or at least not quite as bad with this particular teleport module; however, neither had happened, and it therefore took him a moment to make sure he hadn't lost anything before he could start working on getting himself and Rose home. Miraculously, the screwdriver, the module itself and his companion were all more or less where they were initially; and after a brief sonicking, a familiar blinding light heralded their return.

The warehouse was still quite damp, the creatures themselves having been the ones transported and not necessarily all the water they inhabited; but it was reduced to a comparative puddle, perhaps two inches deep. He grimaced at it; admittedly, the concentration had been high in that area given the location of the teleport, but… even so.

Rose let go of him, retreating a step and attempting, again, to wring out her hair.

"Is that all of them, then?" she asked.

"Should be. Hang on." He fiddled with the screwdriver for a moment before flicking the switch and scanning her with it. She stood patiently and dripped, but the only water she shed was the fault of gravity. "Yep, that's all of them." He pocketed the screwdriver and grinned at her.

"Good," she said happily. "How'd you manage that?"

"Stopped the teleport focussing on smaller organic targets. Normally they wouldn't have gotten through it at all, but they played with the system a bit." He sniffed. "I fixed it, and it only let us through. Simple."

"Why are we still wet, then?" she asked.

The Doctor started making his way to the door. "Water's not an organic target, Rose."

"Right," she said, feeling slightly stupid, and followed him. "I forgot about that."

"Understandable," he allowed.

She skipped a bit to catch up to him, grabbing his hand and looking up at him. "Where to next, then?"

"We're not going to your mum's?" he asked hopefully.

"I meant after that," she said, rolling her eyes a bit.

"Ah." He paused to inhale. "I dunno, really. Your choice, I suppose. Anywhere but a water planet."

She grinned. "I think I can handle that."

-BAD WOLF-

The TARDIS was always very quiet at this time of Earth night. He supposed it only made sense that the ship would follow a human schedule, considering the prevalence of that species amongst his… comrades? Guests? Whatever. He wished she would ignore that habit when there wasn't a human on board, though; the quiet unnerved him somewhat once it went on for too long.

The meeting with Jackie had gone about as well as such an introduction could go, he supposed; she had hugged him by the end of it, which he hadn't particularly liked, but the rest of it was okay. He'd come out the other end alive, at least.

After that was over and done with, though, it had somehow been arranged that Rose would spend the night in the house, forsaking the room in the TARDIS she had occupied for the previous two weeks. And as a result, the old ship was almost painfully empty.

And that was why he was completely ignoring the need to finish the healing trance—his chest ached abominably, even though it felt a bit better than it had a couple of hours ago, and he wasn't entirely sure his brain was working right. Instead, he had opted to recalibrate the less important parts of his vessel, hoping that he would be able to keep going until he felt a little less alone.

It was ridiculous, really, refusing to go to sleep just because there was no one else on the ship, but he decided to blame the mental oddness that necessarily came with a failed trance and not his own loneliness. It wasn't as if he'd never been alone before, after all.

It wasn't as if he'd never be alone again.

Every scrap of his being shrieked defiance at that thought, and he stilled, startled by his own denial. That didn't make sense, he thought. He'd be alone again, certainly; Rose would leave or die or forget him or a thousand other things, and he'd be on his own, and that was fine. He'd be fine. Rose was no more permanent than any other.

And yet… he couldn't quite let himself think that. She'd be there. She had to.

As if on cue, the door creaked open and the very creature occupying his thoughts stepped into view. "Hi," she said quietly.

He swallowed. "Hello," he replied, trying to ignore the faint excitement that was starting to tinge the edges of his mind, simply as a result of her presence. "You're supposed to be asleep."

"You're supposed to be healing."

He glanced at her sharply. "How do you know I haven't finished already?"

She gave a faint huff of amusement. "You're _such _a bad liar sometimes," she commented as she walked up to him.

He blinked at her, confused as to what she was trying to do, but not feeling the need to protest their proximity.

"You see, right here," she continued, touching the skin just to the side of his eyelid, "you're all tense. The rest of you looks normal, but just there…"

There was a breathless moment in which neither one moved. Her eyes were slightly unfocussed as she traced his face with her gaze; and he watched her, fascinated with the delicate human before him, wreathed in the faintest glow of alien time. He could understand with a painful clarity why his parallel had loved her so much, despite all of the reasons why it was a bad idea. It would be so easy, he found himself thinking, to just—

Suddenly, she seemed to remember herself; she jerked in a breath and retreated. Startled and more than a bit disoriented by the loss, he could do little more than give her a slightly puzzled stare.

"It means you're in pain," she said, somewhat sharply, "and it's bad enough that you're pretending it's fine."

He blinked at her, scrambling for a reply. "But the TARDIS," he said eventually. "She sprained her kitchen, don't you remember? I had to fix it." It wasn't a total lie; he had started with the damage from her little hovering stint. Just because he'd gotten distracted didn't mean there weren't actual things wrong with the ship.

Rose sighed at him. "I know you, you could have fixed her in a few minutes if you weren't avoiding something. You always do, when she really needs it. This—" she gestured at the half-open state of the console and the various bits of semi-rubbish he'd scattered across the floor—"is fiddling."

That was cheating, he thought, annoyed. She already knew so much about him and he'd only just met her a couple of weeks ago.

"But I don't like sleeping," he muttered, and noticed with alarm that his tone of voice was shifting dangerously towards "whiny". "It's a waste of time, really, when you think of all the things that you _could _be doing—"

"And normally," she said quite patiently, "I would let you stay awake, except for the fact that you're hurt and need to go back in your… trance… thing."

"And what about you?" he inquired. "Why aren't you asleep? You're human, you need it more than I do."

She gave him a slightly embarrassed smile. "Couldn't," she said. "'S too quiet out there, without the singing."

For a stunned moment, all he could do was stare. "You can hear her?"

She looked alarmed. "Should I not be able to?"

He shook his head a little, marvelling. "It's not quite unheard-of, but… She doesn't usually delve too deeply into her occupants' minds." He gave her a fondly amazed smile. "You, Rose Marion Tyler, are extraordinary."

Her cheeks darkened almost imperceptibly and she looked down, abashed. "Why I'm here, innit?" she asked. "Seem to remember you saying you only took the best." As soon as the words left her mouth, she flinched, her expression closing.

Did she really have to go around quoting things he hadn't said in front of himself? he thought sulkily.

"Exactly," he informed her quietly, trying to pretend he was totally unaffected by the latest in the slowly lengthening list of her slip-ups. It was getting rather annoying and he didn't want to think about why.

She nodded faintly, looking around before seeming to snap abruptly into forced cheerfulness. "Come on, then," she told him. "No more fiddling until you've properly healed, yeah? The poor TARDIS is probably sick of it anyway."

He glared at her, affronted. "No more so than when you were having her fly around under her own power."

She winced slightly and glanced up at the console. "I am sorry for that," she said. "I'm not a spaceship, myself, so I didn't realise…"

The TARDIS thrummed kindly at her, lights flickering, and the girl looked up at the ceiling. Eyes sparkling from the console's light and the faintest of smiles tracing her lips, she gently reached out and pressed her hand against the central column, petting it affectionately for a moment.

She looked at him again without warning and frowned. "What?"

The thought suddenly came to him that he'd been staring. "I—Nothing," he told her. "Nothing at all." He hesitated. "So… you're going to sleep now?" He felt incredibly repetitive, but it was better than not talking at all.

Her eyes narrowed. "Only if you go back in your healing thing."

There was no reason to refuse her.

The TARDIS was always very quiet at this time of Earth night, but at least this time he wasn't alone in the silence.

-BAD WOLF-

When in doubt and lacking nine hundred words of nattering, write more fluff, I say!

Just a notice for you—I have all of this series planned (well, I say all… The episode after next is giving me some problems, but we can ignore that), I have the enemy for series 2 figured out, and everything is very exciting. …to me. No idea what it is to you, but it's making me quite happy. XD

Also, unless a literal miracle happens, I will be relocating in what may perhaps be a very short time. Which will, needless to say, disrupt the update schedule _again_, but I'll try and find a way to make it up to you. :)

And yes, I was initially going to insert the Altie (yes, that's what we're calling him now)/Jackie meeting properly, but… when I actually got to it, I found that I had no idea what to write. So I just kind of ignored it. For which I apologise. –apologises- I might revisit it if I even manage to figure out what happened…

So… uhh… yeah. That's me. Being me. And… yeah. That's about it, really. Be well, everyone! And I will see you… later this week, with the cute little mini-chapter of the next… thingie.

Fairfarren!


	26. Broken Worlds, part I

O hai! It's not a Saturday and I'm writing. …This feels weird.

**Disclaimer:** I don't think I really have to put this here, but force of habit and all that, so… uhh… yeah. Still don't own anything.

SIAPNIAN: It is far too hot here. –grumbles- I wasn't built for this…

**Actually Very Important Announcement Indeed (AVIAI): **So I woke up yesterday, checked the deadlines on my classes just to make sure I was still all nice and not-running-out-of-time-y, and I realised that I did not have a month left on my Latin course, as I had thought. I had exactly a week.Which means that, unfortunately, fanfic must take a backseat for not failing the course I'm actually doing the best in right now, so… Basically, the new update schedule isn't going as seamlessly as I had hoped. I am sorry about that. :(

-BAD WOLF-

"So," the Doctor said as he circled around the console, fiddling with controls that may or may not have been there just to look impressive, "where do you want to go? What do you want to do? When do you want to be?"

Rose, legs tucked neatly under her as she sat in the jumpseat, watched him with an air of affectionate amusement. "You're the one who knows his way around this universe," she informed him. "You pick. Besides, I did it last time."

He pouted a bit. "But we get into more danger whenever you do it," he said.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

"Mostly?"

She giggled a bit, shaking her head at him. "Even if I did pick," she said, "you wouldn't fly her there, and we'd end up a couple of star systems and a thousand years off."

"Oi!" He pointed accusingly at her. "When you take into account the infinity of time and space—"

"You're still off," she interrupted him, grinning. "I can fly her better than you." She thought that she had, once, but she couldn't quite pin the memory down. It gave her a headache, so she stopped trying.

He looked almost comically sceptical. "Prove it."

Rose bit her lip a bit and studied her loosely-clasped hands. She should have known he'd say that. "I don't know all the controls yet," she admitted. "On this one, anyway. I was just…" To tell the truth, she hadn't known all the controls on the other one either, but he didn't need to know that.

"We'll have to change that, then," he replied. His voice was deceptively flippant, and she narrowed her eyes at him to find that he was very carefully not looking at her.

She wasn't sure how to respond, so she didn't. Silence descended for a few moments.

The Doctor, never having been one comfortable with silence, broke it as soon as possible. "Which means," he said, "we seem to be left with no choice but to let the TARDIS decide herself."

She stared at him. "Oh no."

He looked slightly hurt. "Why not?"

Rose stammered for a few seconds. "She… She has this habit of taking us—well, the other TARDIS did, anyway—"

He watched her, face carefully expressionless after the mention of her previous travels. It made her nervous.

"Basically, every time we did that, we nearly got killed."

"And the odds for non-life-threatening situations are better when you pick?" he inquired doubtfully.

"A little, yeah."

"That may have been the case," he replied, "with the _parallel _TARDIS, but what makes you think this one won't be a bit more sensible in her choice of destination?"

"I dunno," she said. "Maybe the fact that their pilots are almost indistinguishable?" She grinned at him, tongue poking out from between her teeth a bit.

He ignored her. "Besides," he said instead, "I thought you _liked_ danger." He bounced over to her. "Come on, Rose. Where's your sense of adventure? Eh?"

She bit her lip and raised an eyebrow at him. He didn't react.

She knew better than to get in a staredown with him again, so she relented. "Fine," she said. "But if there are Slitheen or something outside when we land, I'm blaming you."

He rolled his eyes as he returned to his original place beside the console. "There won't be Slitheen," he said. "That's just ridiculous."

Which meant that there would be. Fantastic.

Before she had a chance to comment on that, though, he'd thrown the final lever—she recognised that one, at least—and sent them spinning wildly through the Vortex. Rose, at least, had the sense to hold onto the seat; the Doctor hadn't taken such precautions, and tumbled to the floor. She worried for a moment that he was hurt—this flight was a bit rougher than normal—until she heard his laugh over the ship's grating roar.

Despite her best efforts, the landing was hard enough to jerk her off the seat. She managed to keep herself from any serious injury, but her dignity was regretfully lost.

She looked at the ceiling for a moment. Was it just her, or were the lights a bit dimmer? Was the TARDIS okay?

A brown shape scrambled to his feet at the edge of her vision and ran over, coming to a stop by her side and holding out a hand. She took it and he helped her pull herself upright.

"You okay?" he asked her, tense with a kind of nervously happy energy. It was infectious, and she found herself forgetting about the ship's welfare and grinning back.

"Yeah," she said.

"Good!" he proclaimed, and dashed over to the doors, seemingly unaware of the fact that he was still holding her hand and dragging her along with him. She laughed, slightly breathlessly, as he opened the door and they walked out.

Rose glanced around. There weren't any Slitheen, she was surprised to note. Come to think of it, there weren't any people at all. "Where are we?"

"I dunno," he said happily. "Earth colony, it looks like. Maybe… fiftieth century? Fifty-first?"

"Jack's time, then," she commented.

He gave her an odd look. "Jack?"

She didn't have time to explain. With a horrifyingly familiar shriek, a Reaper materialised in the sky above them.

-BAD WOLF-

I love Reapers, don't you?

And I _really _wish we were at the finale already. Did you know I completely outlined the Christmas episode a couple of days ago? 'Cause I did. …I'm kind of proud of it, actually, which is baffling.

Anyway. Here I am, here is fic, here is apology… I'll do better next episode. …I hope.

Hope you're all well and not dead of heatstroke or something. :)


	27. Broken Worlds, part II

I dislike humans.

**Disclaimer: **How many thing-owning people do you know who write fanfic?

SIAPNIAN: So I was wandering through some of my old fanfics—Rassilon knows why; they practically embody Old Shame—and realised something startling and uncomfortable. Well, two things. 1. I was such a review-whore back then. I'm sorry. 2. I used a different version of canon for pretty much every one. WTF? I mean, I know that the phrase "Whovian canon" is an oxymoron and all that (thank you, Brona19), but… -shakes head at self-

**AVIAI: I have a mission for you. **My sister, Aelita Madeline, is suffering through several humans being very typically human indeed. All at once. If you wouldn't mind, I am therefore going to direct you over to her profile and ask you to PM her some hugs of an alien/not-typically-human nature, as I think she badly needs them. :( Thank you.

**Apology: **I know, I know I missed last week, and I am so very very sorry. I've had a rough week or six, and my family therefore advised me to let the last update go. I didn't have the energy to decide for myself, so I just kind of went along with it. Again, I am terribly sorry, but… urk. And I know that this chapter's shorter than they usually are, by current standards—they did start out like this, as I recall—, which is hardly a proper apology, but… Rawr. :( I am sorry.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by Aelita Madeline.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was only given one moment for a startled squeak (she quite prided herself on the fact that she'd suppressed her urge to scream) before the TARDIS doors creaked open and she was forcibly yanked back into it.

"Okay," the Doctor said, taking a second to steady her. "That wasn't precisely what I was expecting."

She stepped back a little, preparing to give some kind of sarcastic retort, and then realised she shouldn't have been able to retreat at all.

"The TARDIS is still here," she said, surprised.

He frowned at her a little. "Yes," he said. "Why? Shouldn't she be?"

"I just…" Rose shook her head lightly. "The last time this happened, she sort of got… separated. Once those things showed up, she was just a box."

"Mm," he replied. "The shock of being right next to it when the accident happened probably threw the TARDIS out of her exterior shell. We arrived some time afterwards; she'll be a bit sick for a while, I think, but overall…" He bounced up to the console and spun the scanner around to face him. "First things first," he said, frowning absently at it. "Where are we?"

She absently ran her hand along the railing as she followed him, peering over his shoulder as he hit the side of the device. The ship thrummed, annoyed, but the whirling patterns covering the screen obediently shifted, interlocking and stopping their motion.

"What's it say?"

"Says we're on Shakespeare I," he said, slightly grimly. "First humans to develop their own method of working time travel."

"Guess we know how they got like this, then," she said.

"Suppose so," he mused. "Still have to find out what they did, though. S'pose there's one advantage to actually being there when things go wrong." He smiled gently at her and stepped away from the console.

She bit her lip. They were in the fifty-first century and there had been a mistake involving time travel. Whatever had gone wrong, she really, _really _hoped it wasn't Jack's fault.

-BAD WOLF-

_There. Hopefully he'll get the point this time and not just ignore everything I've been trying to tell him. There's him being stupid and then there's him just being too selfish to even let himself understand, and I rather suspect he's firmly in the latter category._

_No, I didn't do this! Ridiculous mortals—what, you think I'm insane or something? No. That's a last resort, or at least a distinctly later resort. This always will have been going to happen, you know; I just nudged things around so it happened to them now._

_Can't believe you'd accuse me of unleashing Reapers just to prove a point. I mean, really. Am I that untrustworthy? I'm hurt. Really, truly hurt. After all I've done for you people, you turn around and…_

_Hmph._

_The other Doctor—err, the original one—has been human for the past week. It's very disorienting. I've been trying to speak with him inside the watch, but it's not working as well as I'd like and he's not listening anyway. Stupid man. And Martha's being a nuisance, going and getting all infatuated with him like that. Clearly, my attempt to distract her in the sentient-star incident didn't work as well as I had hoped. I think I'm going to have to replace her before too long, to be honest; pity. She could have been lovely if she'd just stuck with swooning over her own species._

_Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. Now I just have to find a place to drop her off and everything will be fine._

_In that universe, anyway. The inhabitants of this one are being troublesome, still, and… what are they doing?_

-BAD WOLF-

"We're going out there," Rose semi-inquired, voice flat.

"Yes."

"We're just running out of the TARDIS into a colony infested by… what are they called again?"

"Reapers. In your language, anyway." He sniffed dismissively.

She glared at him a little. "Firstly, you've been using _my language _for as long as I've known you—"

The Doctor smirked. "Universal translator," he said, gesturing at the console. "How would you know if I wasn't?"

"—and secondly," she continued, patiently ignoring him, "can't you just… I dunno, use one of the however many senses you're continually bragging about—"

"Seventeen." He thought. "And a half."

"—and figure out what happened that way?" She desperately didn't want to go near those things—and more importantly, she didn't want _him _around them either. Not after what happened last time.

She still hadn't forgiven herself for that.

He considered it. "Not really," he said finally. "It would be a bit like trying to talk to someone who's just been ripped in half."

Rose, who had actually tried that once, reluctantly gave up. "So what, we just run?"

"It's what we always do, isn't it?" He smiled at her, more than a little manically. "They won't be expecting us to come out. The nearest building isn't that far away—we'll be fine."

Logically, she knew that it was probably true. The Reapers' hunting techniques hadn't seemed to be very efficient; she couldn't remember anyone being eaten without having been just standing there screeching at the thing. The Doctor had only been caught because he was willingly giving himself up; if they were actually running with a purpose and a destination as opposed to just trying to outrace the creatures however possible…

Still, she worried. Even if it had been practically with his permission, the Time Lord had been killed the last time they'd appeared, and…

…standing there panicking wasn't helpful. She swallowed, steeled herself, and made her way to him.

"Let's go, then," she said, hoping she was the only one who heard the slight quaver in her voice. She wasn't, but although the Doctor gave her a sympathetic look and unnecessarily brushed her forearm with his fingers as he started walking to the door, he didn't mention it out loud. He laid a hand on the doorhandle, hesitated for a moment, and opened it.

They moved in unconscious synchronisation. As soon as there was enough room for her to do so, Rose darted out ahead of the Time Lord, dashing for the nearest building and distracting the Reapers away from him while he closed the door. He took off after her, and by the time she was inside and they started turning to come after him, he was almost at the door. Even so, she watched anxiously until he was safe and beside her.

"There," he said. "You see? We're fine."

She hugged him anyway, closing her eyes and burying her face in his shoulder. He didn't particularly protest, but calmly reciprocated; and she allowed herself to stay there until she'd calmed down a little. She almost felt ashamed; really, they were hardly the _worst _things she'd encountered—but they had killed the Doctor, and that meant they terrified her a little bit more than was normal.

Finally, she let go.

"You alright?" he asked her.

"Yeah," she said absently, looking around to see where they'd ended up. It was a house, fairly small and eerily empty; they'd ended up in what looked to be its main room, with the kitchen on one end, a battered couch on the other and not much in between. There was a cup of something that looked like (but probably wasn't) tea on the counter and a half-full plate next to the sink, as if the inhabitant had been in too much of a hurry to clean up after himself; past that, the area was surprisingly immaculate. There were some papers on a little table in front of the sofa, and that was about it. Rose was struck by how quiet it was. Anyone would think the house's owner had just popped out for a bit and would walk back in at any second, demanding to know who they were and why they were breaking into his home.

She shook her head and forced herself to focus. She was supposed to be trying to figure out what had gone wrong, not observing the unnerving void it had left.

The Doctor, meanwhile, seemed to be blissfully unaffected by it. He was bending over the papers on the table, peering through his glasses at the sketches and scribbled notes covering them.

"This is interesting," he said, frowning in thought.

Obediently, she walked over and looked at the pages. "What is it?" she asked, having been unable to decipher any of it. Even if she could read the person's handwriting, she wouldn't have been able to figure out what they were talking about, judging by the sketches. Clever she might be, but the finer points of advanced technology were more Mickey's forte.

She absently wondered how he was doing.

"It's a time capsule," he said. "Well, not a capsule so much as a manipulator. It would be a good idea for them to add a capsule, though, as—" He noticed the look she was giving him. "…anyway," he said. "Looks like it's in its final stages, too—it's not particularly pretty, but the basic theory's right."

"They got it to work, then," Rose said. "I thought we already knew that, though."

"Yes," he said. "But the important thing is that, entirely by chance, we seem to have gotten ourselves in the house of one of the people working on that particular project." He grinned insanely, and for a moment she forgot the pervasive dread that had been hanging over her since she'd seen the Reaper.

She smiled back. "Lucky, that."

"Quite," he replied, and abruptly straightened, delighted expression vanishing. "He should have some notes somewhere. If we can find a computer…" He trailed off, eyes darting around the room.

"Right," Rose answered unsteadily, baffled by his sudden mood shift. "Um."

But the Doctor had already vanished into another room.

-BAD WOLF-

What was wrong with him? he thought fretfully, as he searched the bedroom for anything computer-like. They were fine, he was fine, she was fine, they were talking—well, he supposed, he was mostly the one who was talking, but there was hardly anything abnormal about that—and happy and everything was good. And platonic. Thoroughly, entirely platonic. Occasionally.

There was, he informed himself as he started opening every drawer he could find, absolutely no reason for the sudden burst of curiosity over… over… things that he didn't do with his companions. With anyone, really—usually, sometimes—but especially not with his companions. Mostly.

Well, it had been partially her fault. She _had _been standing only a few inches away from him, and she had been smiling in that particular way that implied an invitation to the aforementioned activities, and she was only human. So, really, it was her fault. In a way.

Except, he thought, for the fact that her affections were already very firmly engaged, and not to him. Well… to him. But not this him. Her… her-ness had been entirely unintentional—which was, paradoxically, precisely why he'd had the sudden urge to get away from her as quickly as possible.

It really, really, _really _shouldn't hurt that much. She was human, she was allowed… and that was the end of it.

The entire thing was ridiculous, really. He'd been alone for too long. The TARDIS had kept bugging him about that, but he hadn't listened.

Until Rose. He wondered why that was…

A Reaper ramming against the wall outside managed to jerk him back into awareness. Right, he recalled dazedly. Crisis. Danger to all of space-time. Total lack of information as to said danger, which he was… completely failing to rectify.

Thankfully, the object of his current state of distraction seemed to have retained some kind of concentration on the aforementioned task. "Doctor?" she called. "Is this it?"

He jumped, startled. Mentally shaking himself, he walked back outside.

She stared at him for a moment, frowning. "Doctor?" she asked hesitantly. "Are you alright?"

How could she do that? It wasn't fair.

"Fine," he replied instantly, and tried to focus on what she was holding. After a moment's concentration, he finally managed it, and accordingly stepped over to take it from her and examine it more closely.

It was roughly the size of a notebook, albeit a great deal thinner, translucent, and a very light shade of blue. It was warm and hummed almost imperceptibly against his skin; experimentally, he ran his fingers across the surface, and it came to life. The object darkened and became opaque, and pale letters swam into view.

"Well done," he murmured, briefly skimming over the page.

"Is that it, then?" she asked, standing next to him and peering at it.

He swallowed. "It is," he replied, trying to ignore the train of thought that patiently attempted to reinsert itself into his mind. "And, if our luck holds, it may very well tell us what's going on."

-BAD WOLF-

_Hmm. That's interesting. And yes, that was me—nudging his thoughts in the just-take-her-home-already direction wasn't particularly helping, as you might have noticed, so I changed tactics a little. And that was… There might be something in that. At the very least, reminding him of her affection for her original Doctor got a reaction, which is more than I can say for most of the other thoughts I've been trying to put into his head. And now she's noticed that he's disturbed, which could… I might be able to use that. That's good. Excellent, actually. If I can exacerbate that, it could split them apart…_

_What really worries me, at this point, is Rose herself. She's getting far too attached to the parallel version for my liking. At this rate, she might not even entirely __want__ to go home by the end of this, and that would be… well. Not very good. I've no qualms about hurting the parallel Doctor—or, indeed, anyone—but her… I try to shy away from it whenever possible. I'm alive right now because of her, you know. That usually incites a very specific kind of gratitude._

_So I need her to give up on her ideas regarding the parallel very, very soon. Alternatively, said parallel could always just come to his senses. Either way…_

_I really don't want to hurt her, but I'm starting to fear there isn't another choice._

-BAD WOLF-

I'm trying very hard not to write an Alice in Wonderland 2010/DW crossover and my friends are being unhelpful. Annoyance is mine.

Also, WE PASSED 300 REVIEWS. WTF. –dances with happiness and joy- I really, really, really can't believe this. I'm all… squeeful. And stuff. I love you all so much.

Also also, I seem to be in the doldrums when it comes to this series; this episode and the one immediately following aren't very exciting for me. But the ones afterwards are rather interesting, so hopefully I'll actually want to work on them, which means I'll hopefully update on time… Yay hope!

Also also also, thank God for the aforementioned adaptation of AiW. It's finally taken my mind off of Ten's absence and is helping me retain the tattered remnants of my sanity. Which is no small task, I assure you.

Also also also also, 300 REVIEWS OMG I LOVE YOU!


	28. Broken Worlds, part III

So apparently, when I was little, Jack Skellington terrified me enough that I got a phobia out of it. But… I thought the Borg Queen without her armour-body-thingie-whatnot was the coolest thing ever. Younger!me was _weird._

**Disclaimer:** I just realised that by the end of this, I will have said this seventy-one times in this fic alone. Meep. Anyway, no.

SIAPNIAN: I just realised that the little application-bar-thingie (dock?) at the bottom of the screen has a curvy line on it. Also, I have no idea whether or not Rose knew about the whole Jack's-not-his-real-name thing, so I just assumed she didn't. If she did, it's not that hard of a detail to change.

**Apology **(I've been doing this a lot lately, haven't I? Rassilon…)**:** There… really… isn't an excuse for this one, I'm afraid. It just wasn't sounding right and eventually I learned that it was because I had been reading stories with writing styles that were very different from mine, and I ended up subconsciously mimicking them because _apparently _that's what I do. So, basically, I had to rewrite this entire chapter. With my brother constantly trying to distract me with SG-1 and James Bond. Rawrs. And stuff. I am sorry. I'm not very good at this updating-on-time thing, I'm afraid…

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by Aelita Madeline AND TheDisturbedPoet on incredibly short notice. Let us all hug them for their awesome! :D

-BAD WOLF-

Rose had eventually given up trying to read the journal, as the Doctor's annoyingly superior reading speed allowed him to continue to the next page before she'd even managed to get past the first line. Instead, she sat on the couch, absently tapping the cushion and looking worriedly through the windows. Every minute or so, the walls shuddered lightly as a Reaper renewed its attack on the building; she wondered why they couldn't get in (and why they didn't just break the windows and enter that way), and said so.

"Hmm?" the Doctor asked, attention clearly focussed more on the screen in front of him than what she was saying.

"Last time… this… happened," she began, gesturing awkwardly with one hand to indicate the entirety of the temporal pyrotechnics currently flailing invisibly around them, "the only way we stayed alive was because the church was old enough to stop them from getting in."

"They cannibalised the spaceships," he said instantly, not even looking at her. "This house is reinforced with the kinds of things that normally keep out whatever interstellar travel can throw at you—ooh, this is interesting…"

"What?" Getting slightly sick of just sitting there and not knowing what was going on, she got up and started looking over his shoulder again. "What is it?"

"Someone was killed in an early test of the project—hang on, let me see if I can…" He trailed off as he reached inside his pocket and retrieved his screwdriver. Rose waited semi-patiently as he briefly used the device on the journal; the screen fizzled, as if startled, and then went to something that looked suspiciously like a loading screen.

She couldn't quite stop herself from snickering as he sonicked it again, clearly annoyed at the wait. The screen went severely pixellated for a moment, as if to spite him, before finally solidifying. A picture swam into view: dark hair, piercingly blue eyes, a slight smirk that could only be described as "devilish"…

Oh no.

"Jack," Rose breathed, horrified.

The Doctor gave her a confused look. "It—"

"I don't care," she interrupted him, voice shuddering slightly despite herself, "what it says his name is." She stared at the photo for a moment longer. He was a bit younger than he was when she knew him, and the name was definitely different—odd, that; was it another parallel-universe thing or was Jack not actually his name?—but he was definitely there.

Or he had been. He was dead? She swallowed hard, chest aching sharply at the thought. The loss of the original him had been bad enough, despite the knowledge that he _was _alive (she'd managed to get that much out of the Doctor, at least, although he was frustratingly silent about everything else). She'd considered the probability of a parallel's existence, wondered if she'd ever get to meet him…

He wasn't her Jack, she reminded herself. (Just like the Time Lord standing next to her wasn't, technically, _her _Doctor, nudged a thought, but she shoved it aside—now definitely wasn't the right time to start arguing with herself about that again.) He wasn't her Jack. But…

"What happened?" she asked, eyes still riveted onto his, trying to re-memorise his features. She'd forgotten how much she missed him…

Obediently, the Doctor returned to the original journal entry. "The machine malfunctioned," he told her quietly. "He was caught in a temporal resonance field."

She looked up at him, biting her lip for a moment before speaking again. "Which means?"

He hesitated.

This was bad.

"He was trapped in a state of partial intertemporal transference." The Doctor thought for a moment. "Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"It's… long and complicated and unpleasant. Let's just say that eventually he died, and at the time, it was probably a good thing."

Rose took a step back, feeling slightly unsteady. He hadn't just died—he'd been… She wasn't even entirely sure of what kind of fate he met, but…

"I'm sorry," the Time Lord said quietly.

"'s okay," she answered instinctively. Deciding that she didn't want to think about it, she changed the subject. "So what happened then?"

The Doctor took her hand, evidently noticing her diversion. "They reworked the device," he continued. "Actually got it right that time. Picked someone else to test it, and went on with the project." He gave her a grin. "Humans," he said affectionately. "You just don't give up, do you?"

She tried to return the expression and found that she couldn't quite manage it. She was getting better at ignoring traumatic events when she had to, but it would take a few more centuries before she could switch moods as quickly as the Doctor.

"So who'd they pick?" she asked him. And what had they decided to change?

"Someone named Alice," he replied, frowning slightly at the screen. "She volunteered. Whoever wrote this was a bit pessimistic about her…"

"Why?" Rose looked up at him. His eyes flashed to hers for a moment before glancing, just as quickly, away.

That was strange.

She wasn't given a chance to analyse it, though, because he instantly started talking again. "She was one of… of Jack's friends. Apparently." Rose allowed herself to be amused at the hasty nominal substitution. "He was worried that she might do something stupid to save him, but apparently she was a fairly trustworthy and intelligent sort of creature, so he passed it off."

"And that was a bad idea," she stated.

"Possibly. We'd have to actually go to the point where things went wrong to find out, but… could be." He looked at her again and actually managed to meet her gaze for an extended period that time.

"You know when we're going, then?" she inquired, tilting her head a bit to look at him properly.

"More or less." The Doctor dropped the journal unceremoniously on the couch before putting his hands in his pockets and turning to face her again. "Flying the TARDIS through an anomaly like this isn't quite as simple as it normally is."

"Well, yeah."

"We'll only get one shot at it," he continued, ignoring her interruption. "The last entry's the day before they were going to test it, so we may have to wait a bit before anything exciting happens."

She smiled. "That's a bit of a change," she teased him gently. "Are you sure we'll not be running for our lives?"

"Well, we do still have to get past the Reapers…" he said, grinning.

Rose laughed a bit. "Only you would be happy about that," she informed him, taking his hand. "Come on, then. Let's go."

-BAD WOLF-

_No no no no no no NO. He does not get to look at her like that. Actually, he shouldn't be getting to look at her at all—something that I'd rectify if he'd stop getting all… infatuated and ruining everything. What is it with this incarnation? The original spent the entirety of his last adventure being a total idiot over some nurse or other and this one's decided to do the same with Rose. Emotions are all very well and good when they don't threaten to blow up the universe!_

_He'll be wanting to snog her next. Just watch. I brought him here so that perhaps he would figure out what keeping her is going to do to his entire world, but all he can think about is…_

_If my creator wasn't so attached to this particular version of him, I'd be sorely tempted to kill him and hope that the next version was a little more logical. He doesn't even need to be sane—there's not much of a chance of that happening ever again—; he just needs to know when to stop being so stubborn._

_As it is, though, regeneration isn't an option._

_I hate this._

-BAD WOLF-

It should have been so simple.

They'd managed to get to the house from the TARDIS with no problems; naturally, he assumed that the same would work just as well in reverse, and hadn't really thought much of the process.

He opened the door, letting it swing out entirely and bang gently into the outside wall. There was a moment in which nothing happened, wherein they waited to see what the Reapers were doing; seeing no immediate problems, she took his hand. Her fingers threaded between his with unconscious ease and his left heart jolted a bit.

Maybe, if he hadn't been distracted, there would have been no need for any of this. As it was, though, she smiled at him and he grinned back, feeling more than a little giddy for reasons he absolutely refused to think about, and off they went.

They didn't notice the air rippling in front of them, therefore, until after they were already almost to the ship; and by then, it was too late. A Reaper materialised rather inconveniently, floating directly between them and the TARDIS; they skidded to an unsteady halt as quickly as they could.

Rose dropped his hand and ran—but not quite in the direction he was expecting. Instead of trying to go back into the house (which had a decent chance of being a futile effort), she made her way slightly left of the beast.

"Rose, what are you doing?" he shouted after her, appalled.

"Saving the world," she retorted. Apparently having reached her destination, she turned to face the Reaper. It paused, evidently unsure of which of them to pursue. "You're the only one here who can fly the TARDIS, so…"

She was going to…?

Oh no.

"Rose, _don't!_" The rational part of his mind kicked in and informed him that A. if she was determined on being bait, there was very little he could do to stop her, B. even if she _wasn't _determined on being bait, there was still very little he could do, and C. the one blocking their way wasn't the only Reaper in the vicinity anyway—they would be escaping from that one only to have the rest descend.

Sometimes, he desperately hated the rational part of his mind. He opted instead to listen to the much larger part that was trying to calculate how much time it would take to get to her.

Her voice interrupted his thoughts. "I don't belong in this universe," she informed the creature.

It swung around to face her and she instinctively took a step back. When she spoke again, her voice shook slightly, but she stood her ground. "I mean, he's 900 years old, yeah, but I wasn't even born in this world."

The Doctor forgot how to breathe.

"So if you're going to eat anyone…"

The Reaper thought for a half-moment before snapping its mouth open.

Rose didn't take her eyes off of it. "Doctor," she said, quite calmly. "Run."

It pounced.

As it was wont to do in such moments, Time slowed in its dance around him. He wasn't entirely certain if he liked that development or not. It gave him some extra time to think, yes, but it also meant that he had to watch the creature's descent towards his companion a lot more slowly than he normally would have.

He really, really wished he could control his temporal-manipulation instincts a bit better. Decelerating his perception of events in a crisis was very helpful, but…

He should be helping, he thought. He should be doing something brilliant (again), saving her life (again) and running _with _her into his ship to save the world (again). He shouldn't just be standing here, watching her waiting for her own death, and considering the fact that it might be best to turn and let her sacrifice be worth something.

She shouted again, although he couldn't be sure if there were words in it or just an audible representation of her fear. The sound seemed subtly out of sync with the movement of her lips, and he forced himself to focus on that oddity instead of what, exactly, was going on.

The aforementioned rational part of his mind kicked in again. She'd told him to run, and he should do so. She was buying him time, making sure that he, at least, would be able to get to the TARDIS. He was the only one who could fly her; he was the only one who could fix this, but he couldn't do that if he was eaten.

_No._ Don't think that word.

She'd be back as soon as he repaired the timeline, anyway. The Reapers never would have come at all, as far as the rest of the universe was concerned. This wasn't a permanent sacrifice. He knew that and she knew that and that was why she was doing this at all. She trusted him to be able to fix this, to save her, to bring her and everyone else back and if he waited any longer…

Although he couldn't remember making a conscious decision to do so, he started running.

He tried to get inside the TARDIS before he had to hear her scream.

He failed.

-BAD WOLF-

There! Huzzah for actually having a cliffie to end the chapter on, as opposed to inventing one and awkwardly pasting it in. Rawrgh.

OKAY. I am going to try very, very, _very _hard to get the next chapter done on time. VERY. …which means that I probably won't. Unless I manage to channel my guilt as effectively as I hope I will be able to. (I am infinitely sorry about all of this. :( )

In other news, hi! How are you?


	29. Broken Worlds, part IV

I just realised that my current yarr-I-don't-want-to-write-this mood isn't so much because I don't like _this _episode in particular, but because I don't like the one _after _it. Blargh. Angst. Also, it… probably would have been a good idea to start this earlier than Saturday, but… well. You know me. XD

**Disclaimer:** .

SIAPNIAN: I. ATE. FISH. CUSTARD. TODAY. You all needed to know that. ALL OF YOU. –flails-

**Apology:** I really do fail at this whole update-schedule thing, don't I?

**Non-Warning: **Betaed by Aelita Madeline.

-BAD WOLF-

She was dead.

The Doctor took a moment to absorb that fact. Rose Tyler, saviour of at least two universes, thoroughly extraordinary human being, his—

She was dead. Gone, in just a few seconds, without even the slightest indication that she had been there at all.

And she'd done it knowingly. Willingly. For him. Part of him was only slightly startled by that; he was _a _Doctor, after all, even if he wasn't her original Time Lord; hadn't she dictated, at least in part, some instances of her doing such things for him in similar circumstances? It was incredibly Rose, what she had done, and really shouldn't surprise him very much.

Besides, it had been very sensible of her. He was the only one who could fly the TARDIS, after all, and the only way to distract the Reaper sufficiently was to become its prey herself. While she would be undoubtedly useful in resetting the timeline, she wasn't technically necessary. She'd saved the world, really.

And yet, despite that, he couldn't get over the fact that _she had just died out there._ Probably painfully and definitely terribly, and it didn't matter that if all went well (and he would make sure it did) she never would have died at all—right now, she was gone, and that was all that mattered.

The Doctor had, of course, lost companions before in ways much more permanent than this. In the end, he knew, she would join their ranks. Technically, he would eventually lose all of them—which had been no insignificant part of his semi-solitary lifestyle following the Time War (well, that and the fact that no one really wanted to be around a creature that unshakably melancholy). He just… He hadn't expected to even get this close to that particular separation until much later in their travels together. Maybe a year or two, and then he would start wondering when her time would come, but certainly not now. Not after just a couple of months. Not like that.

Not to save his lives.

No, a thought came; it wasn't just for his sake that she had given herself up. Her death (he flinched at the word, the shock and pain of the event stabbing through him even more sharply) had bought him enough time to get to the TARDIS and therefore fix the timeline, save her.

His ribcage seemed momentarily to tighten around his lungs. Save her. She'd voluntarily gone to a horrifying demise because she trusted that he would be able to rescue her. For her to have that level of faith in him… He was used to people relying on him, of course: doing thoroughly insane things because they knew he would stop them from coming to any real harm (most of the time). He had a history of being the recipient of that kind of behaviour, but from her… From her, it was somehow different. More. He tried, and failed, to adequately explain why.

The Doctor swallowed, shaken. Rassilon, he'd watched galaxies burn—_made _them burn; and he was this disturbed by the death of a singular human woman he'd known for that short a time (relatively speaking)? Who _was _she? Why…?

The TARDIS, who had become rather attached to Rose of late (a phenomenon that still confused him somewhat), momentarily pulled herself out of her own mourning to be quietly amused at him. If he couldn't see why he was so affected by Rose's death, _she _certainly wasn't going to tell him.

And anyway, she added, if he was going to dwell on exactly what she had done, he needed to do it later. Time was still unravelling; they could only barely make one trip _now_, and if he kept waiting…

She was right, he reluctantly admitted. Shoving his tangled mess of emotions aside for the moment, therefore, he stepped over to the console.

-BAD WOLF-

_Well. Um. That was unexpected._

_I suppose I should have seen it coming, really. Of course, I was distracted; I was trying to do something more sensible than dying, like shoving the offending creature back into the Vortex or distract it or something—but of course she wouldn't know that. She doesn't even know that I'm a separate entity, much less that I'm still very much alive. And free of the TARDIS. That bit's important, too._

_That was rather heroic of her, really. And quite useful—the temporal breach is making it difficult for me to influence events. I'd be impressed if it hadn't also been such a thoroughly annoying thing to do—in the long run, at least. Her Time Lord-related self-sacrificial tendencies hadn't been fully exhibited in front of this Doctor, and his thoughts at seeing what she's just done… Well, they're taking a rather inconvenient turn. I mean, well done for the whole saving-his-lives-and-therefore-the-universe thing, but I didn't like the way he was thinking about her before this. I don't even want to consider what he'll do once he gets her back…_

_And he will get her back. Rassilon knows (actually, he doesn't, nor does he care) I want her away from this Doctor as quickly as possible, but… This wasn't the plan for accomplishing that. Killing her, although very effective for half of said scheme, won't get her back to her home universe very efficiently._

_Not that the Doctor would be much help at this point anyway. Last time I checked, he was in 1969 without his TARDIS. Not particularly smart, that, although I suppose he couldn't help it at the time._

_Now. Let's see if we can't get the Doctor—the other one—out of this mess without blowing up the Vortex, shall we?_

-BAD WOLF-

It was a beautiful morning by almost anyone's standards. The sun seemed almost intolerably cheerful, shining vividly enough to be oppressive were it not for several conveniently-placed clouds scattered about the pale teal sky. The subtle lilac overtones in the grass seemed brighter than ever, and the little birdlike mammals native to the planet screeched joyously in every silver-tinged tree.

Alice Jacobs saw it and it made her nauseous. Well, to be perfectly honest, _everything _made her nauseous at this point; she would have managed to be ill no matter what it was like outside. Tomorrow, she and everyone else in the facility would die. And it would be her fault.

She shuddered, closing her eyes and clenching her fists against the wave of horror that crashed through her. It wasn't supposed to be like this, she lamented. She wasn't a murderer. She wasn't! She wouldn't have even considered doing this if not for… for…

A choked noise escaped her lips. Everyone else had managed to get over his (she skipped over his name in the hopes that it would dull the loss. It didn't) death, but she… He was one of the strongest people she'd ever known and, by the end of it, he had _wanted _death. Welcomed it.

And he, she knew, wouldn't be the first to die as a result of the project. Far from it. Which was why, she told herself firmly, she had to do this. If she didn't, the human race would destroy all of history, in the end.

Alice whimpered quietly to herself and glanced at the clock. Eleven hours until the test, and she had been up for most of the night going over her plan. Sleep might be a good idea; she wanted to mess up the timeline, yes, but only in a very specific and controlled way. Passing out in the middle of it would not be helpful.

She sighed, checked to make sure the revised plans for the device were still safely tucked away, and went to bed.

She was too distracted to worry about the box materialising in the middle of the street.

-BAD WOLF-

The flight was, impossibly, even worse than expected; sometimes, the Doctor was barely able even to cling to the console, much less pilot the ship properly. Fortunately, the TARDIS knew what she was doing (probably better than he did, but he wasn't going to admit that), and they managed to disentangle themselves from the breach with only six explosions and two electrocutions.

As the Time Lord coughed violently and waited for the smoke to clear, she wearily apologised about that. While she was fond of utilising such tactics as disciplinary measures against him, she didn't like it so much when he'd done nothing wrong.

"Thanks," he muttered sarcastically. Somehow, he managed to forget about what had just happened for long enough to half-expect Rose to giggle quietly at the exchange.

When he remembered half a second later, he had to take a moment to lean against the console and close his eyes.

It had only been a couple of minutes and already he missed her terribly. He hoped that he'd arrived as early as he thought he had; he could use the period of waiting for something to happen to try and get his emotions under control. This felt like a complex enough rift to fix if Rose _had _been safe; having to deal with the effects on top of it…

But there was still a chance that he didn't have that much time, the TARDIS reminded him. She'd tried to give him a few extra hours, but…

"Type 40s aren't supposed to fly through that, I know," he interrupted, perhaps a little sharply.

She briefly expressed her displeasure before she valiantly attempted to turn her lights back on. With their spasmodic assistance, he managed to get to the door; instinctively, he glanced behind him to see where Rose was, knowing even as he did it that she wouldn't be there.

This was ridiculous.

Trying his best to ignore the event and its associated effects, he yanked open the door and exited the TARDIS.

He wasn't particularly surprised that, when he got outside, the first thing he saw was a gun.

Or six.

-BAD WOLF-

Alice awoke feeling even worse than when she had, finally, gone to sleep. Before, she had at least had her exhaustion to distract her from her inner turmoil—but she'd managed to remove that obstacle, and was now panicking uninhibited.

One hour. She shook slightly as she pulled her hair back, deciding not to pay any particular attention to her appearance beyond that. She'd be dead before the day was out anyway.

She fished the plans out of their hiding place, shoved them quickly in her satchel, and swung it over her shoulder. A flash of blue accosted her vision as she exited the house, but the box slid into the back of her mind as soon as she looked away. If she hadn't been as distracted as she was, she might have worried about that; but as it was, it was forgotten.

Living as close to the facility as she did, she didn't need any secondary transportation to get to it. Or she wouldn't, if she'd awakened a little earlier.

She decided to forego it anyway, and walked into the building several minutes after she was supposed to be preparing for the test. She felt muddled, somehow, and every instinct she had was shrieking at her to run away, to stop herself from doing this; each step forward increased the level of adrenalin swimming around her system.

"You're late," commented Stephen as she passed his desk. Was he the first person to talk to her? She wasn't sure.

"I know."

There was a slightly awkward pause, and Alice wondered if she should have said something else. "There's someone asking for you, by the way," he said, frowning absently at the computer.

She froze. "What?"

"Said he was a time traveller and needed to talk to you." He looked at her. "Any idea what that's about?"

A time-traveller wanted to see her when she was about to incite a paradox. That… wasn't good. "No," she lied quietly. So… she failed? Or did she? Or…

He glanced back down. "Miranda doesn't want you to see him," he continued absently. "Which settles it, I suppose."

"What?"

Stephen's eyes returned to her. "When was the last time you did anything Miranda wanted you to? And are you _sure _you're alright?"

Right. She had forgotten about that particular bit of ongoing rebellion. Funny, the things that slipped one's mind when going to one's death. "Yeah," she replied, slightly dazed. "Just nervous."

"They fixed the problem with the initiator," he reminded her. "They're completely sure that nothing will go wrong with this one."

"They were completely sure about the last one, too," she replied. Let him think that was the only reason she was out of sorts.

He made a noncommittal noise.

Alice swallowed. "Where is he, then?"

Stephen grinned at her. "Knew you wouldn't be able to resist."

-BAD WOLF-

Just in case you didn't see it the first time, I ATE FISH CUSTARD TODAY. OMR.

Also, did you people hack into my computer and disable The Sims 3? Because it went all "I'm not going to work anymore kthxbai" at a _very _convenient time, fic-writing-wise. –eyenarrow-

Also also, last chapter was the halfway point. Approximately. Well, halfway through the last chapter was the halfway point. Yay! Unless you count the Christmas episode as part of the rest of the series. Whereupon… somewhere between next chapter and the one after that is the halfway point. …except the Christmas episode has 6 or 7 chapters, instead of 5… so… Oh, whatever. Anyway, we're somewhere around a Point of Halfway! –cheers-

Aaaand… I apologise in advance for the next episode, because, again, it's… kind of a cop-out.

And and I'm afraid this chapter's a bit of a disappointment. Rawrgh. I'm sorry.


	30. Broken Worlds, part V

I'm tremendously hungry at the moment.

**Disclaimer:** -headdesk-

SIAPNIAN: Soo... The Reason you're getting this a day early. Evidently one of my reader-reviewer-thingie-whatnot-awesomeness-peeps (what do I call you again? O.o ) is having a birthday at the moment. So... happiness to thee. And a chapter. :) Which will hopefully incite happiness. Yay! (It's a bit late, I'm afraid, but… IT'S STILL FRIDAY.)

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by Aelita Madeline. She's a wonderful person, you know. And so are all of you. ^_^

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor, generally speaking, wasn't very good at waiting. It had been exciting enough, he supposed, when they'd still been trying to question him; he had very patiently told them exactly who he was and that he needed to talk to Alice to stop her from blowing up the universe, and they (just as patiently) had ignored him. It had gotten to the point where he'd almost been tempted to show them the TARDIS; but, come to think of it, proving that he was an insanely advanced alien being who knew far more about this sort of thing than they ever could would probably just annoy them. Besides, they might try and break into his ship to figure her out, and although he highly doubted they'd be able to do much of anything, an irritated TARDIS was not on his list of things he particularly enjoyed. As if he didn't get electrocuted _enough..._

But, eventually, they had just left him alone. He had, at last, persuaded one of them to send Alice down to him when she showed up; he seemed to be the only creature in the facility who wasn't determined to be entirely unhelpful. Of course, he didn't believe the Doctor entirely, which was a bad idea in any case, but at least he was humouring him. Which was almost as good.

Getting said person to send Alice, though, meant that he had to stay and wait for her. Unless she didn't want to come, whereupon... well. Time, although it was still, in general, screaming at the top of its metaphorical lungs, wasn't damaged yet—not here. And he should be able to sense her when she got close enough. She had broken—would be breaking, would have been breaking, etc.; he hated human languages sometimes. The tenses never seemed to work properly—most of the universe; that was bound to leave something he could trace.

He tried to find her and failed. She hadn't arrived yet, then.

Which meant that he had to keep waiting.

There was a slight thud as his forehead met the wall. He wasn't built for this, he thought fretfully. This regeneration wasn't supposed to stay still. Well, very few of his regenerations were—but this one...

He almost considered trying to break out of the makeshift cell (which really wouldn't be that difficult, even if he hadn't had his screwdriver with him; clearly, the inhabitants of this particular planet weren't very experienced in the art of imprisoning people), and then remembered that it would be a bad idea. Humans, in general, didn't like it when you escaped from wherever they'd put you. It made them suspicious and annoyed, and he didn't need anyone to be suspicious and annoyed right now. Especially Alice. If she didn't listen to him...

She had to. There wasn't another option.

He wished Rose were with him. Even being bored out of his considerable mind in the basement of a scientific facility would have been better with her there.

That thought disturbed him slightly, but he pretended it didn't. Of course it would be better. It would be better with anyone, really, but particularly someone he got along with. And he got along with Rose rather well. A bit too well, some would probably say, but he would disagree. If he knew who these mysterious "some" were, of course. As it was...

He hit his forehead against the wall again to get his brain to shut up. It didn't work.

It was a lot easier, he thought, when he at least had someone to voice his inner monologue _to_. Not that it would have been very exciting for them if there had been—his thoughts kept going around in tiny circles (_Rose-Reapers-Alice-waiting-Rose_) with very little deviation.

Still. It would be something to do. Annoying people was better than just standing here, waiting for a temporal distortion to walk in and let him make it stop being all... temporal and distorted.

As soon as he did that—and he _would_ do it, he thought darkly; as if he didn't have enough reasons to fix the universe, it was the only way to get his... to get Rose back—, everything and everyone would be there again. The universe would quietly reset itself with Rose in it. The logical part of his brain was nudging at him to stop moping, to go back to the source of the paradox before Time entirely ripped itself apart, but this particular regeneration cycle seemed to be rather fond of emotions, so he let himself wallow a bit more.

Until a tangle of to-be-broken timelines made itself—or herself, rather—known, and he straightened. Alice was here, then. Whether she'd actually be curious enough to visit him was another matter, but… well. He'd figure it out later.

-BAD WOLF-

_This is very disorienting, you know, not being able to safely influence things. And irritating. Can't forget irritating._

_It's also strange not having Rose there. Well… she will be there again fairly soon, otherwise I wouldn't be in nearly this good a mood—but still. She's gone. She's not supposed to be gone._

_Of course, she isn't supposed to be there either. I like the fact that the parallel's so determined on bringing her back; that's good, at least. I just don't like why. He's slipping too far into the kinds of things that I've been trying to keep out of his head ever since he met her, and I can't even do anything about them! If he carries on like this… I might have to speed things up._

_And he's not even making the connection between the Reapers and what he's doing right now. At the moment, I'm kind of wondering whether he's being deliberately thick or he genuinely hasn't noticed. Either option is… not particularly helpful._

_Better than figuring it out and trying to keep her anyway, at least._

_Ah well. I won't be able to do much here right now and things seem to be going fairly smoothly. Besides, the Master appears to be coming back in my home universe—I need to sort that out first. As much as I hate admitting it, Rose can wait just this once._

_After all, we need her to at least have a Doctor to return to by the end of this._

-BAD WOLF-

This was a bad idea.

Alice stood and stared at the door, biting her lip and trying to decide whether or not she actually wanted to come in. She could only assume he knew what she'd done—err, would do… would have done? She got a bit dizzy just thinking about it—; why else would he come? But if a time traveller was here, now, it meant she failed (would fail, would have failed), right? What she was doing should make anyone in their right minds give up on the science altogether, for some time at least.

So… how was he here? And why was he here? If she already would have failed, why even bother coming?

"Are you going to stand out there all day, Alice?" a voice inquired from within.

She jumped. "How do you know my name?"

"Oh, you know," he replied flippantly.

"…No, I really don't."

"Well."

Curiosity won. She opened the door.

The man inside blinked at her. "About time you came in," he said conversationally. "Of course, if you'd really stood there all day, you wouldn't have been there to mess up the timeline in the first place, so I suppose it would have worked itself out."

She swallowed nervously, briefly taking in the ruffled hair, odd combination of suit and trainers, and seemingly half-grieving intensity of the creature in the room before she spoke. He certainly looked odd enough to be a time traveller, she mused; not that appearances meant much, but still. The eccentricity was slightly reassuring.

Until she remembered his comment.

"So that is why you're here, then." Well, she thought. There really weren't very many other reasons to want to see her.

"Yeah," he replied, as if that should be obvious.

"Right."

There was silence for a few moments.

"Any chance you'll decide not to do it?" he asked hopefully.

"Umm…" she said. "Probably not?"

"Uncertainty! I like that. Uncertainty is good. Well. In some cases, it is."

She blinked at him. "But if you're here," she said slowly, "it means that it didn't work, right? So why…?"

"Oh no," he replied. "It worked."

"But—"

"You can't honestly believe that humans are the only creatures around developing time travel, can you?"

She wasn't entirely sure how to answer that. "I have to…" she started to say.

"So," he interrupted. "What makes a harmless little semi-scientist like you suddenly decide to destroy the universe?"

Alice bristled at the use of the prefix "semi" and the word "harmless", and then jolted straight back into confusion at the last three words. She was beginning to feel slightly dizzy, what with all the mood changes.

"The universe?" she echoed.

"Well," he said, "technically, not all of it. But most of it. And the rest…" He winced. "Not pretty."

She let out a breath and, finding herself a bit unsteady, leaned against the wall. "I didn't mean…" she began, and realised that she wasn't sure how to end the sentence. Instead, she let the fragment dangle there, unnoticed.

-BAD WOLF-

Honestly, the Doctor thought to himself, she didn't look like the universe-destroying type. Didn't sound like it, either; too many ellipses. And, well, not everyone was as good at verbal communication as he was, but even so, it was strange.

"What happened?" he asked her gently. She looked frightened enough as it was; as much as he wanted to force her to keep the timeline unharmed, to bring Rose back as quickly as possible, it wouldn't help. Not this time.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I really am. I just… I can't let…" Alice sighed, seeming exasperated with her own inability to speak in complete sentences. "Can I ask you a question?" she inquired, seemingly out of nowhere.

"Technically, you already did," he couldn't resist saying.

She ignored him. "How do you travel in time without messing things up?"

"Genetic safeguards against temporal damage. Hurts me as well as it."

She nodded, very slowly. "And that makes it alright for you, then."

He tipped his head slightly to the side. "What do you mean?"

She inhaled. "We don't have that," she said, staring intently at the floor. "We won't know when to stop and we'll just destroy everything and—" She cut herself off, blinking fiercely.

"Ah," the Doctor said. "And you're trying to go back and stop… what?"

She seemed to crumple a bit. "Anyone else from dying."

So this was about Jack, he thought. (He was slightly disturbed at the fact that the name had already firmly replaced the man's real one, at least in his head; Rose was far too powerful an influence on him, really. He couldn't quite mind it, though.)

"Alice," he said, very quietly, "time has a way of repairing itself. Humans might not have the same instincts that I do, but eventually even you can figure out what kind of events are safe to fiddle with and what aren't. And when you don't… well. That's what I'm here for."

"It's not that simple."

He raised his eyebrows at her. "I've been doing this for nine hundred years," he informed her. "Really, it is. Well, it isn't. But it is. Sort of."

"My friend _died _as a result of this project," she snapped.

"And mine died as a result of what you're about to do to it."

He'd at least managed to keep his voice calm, but she still flinched. She straightened, though, seeming almost to be steeling herself.

"So I find something else to modify," she said. "Something that'll still stop us from…" She flapped a hand about for a moment.

"Alice, Alice, Alice," he sighed, rubbing his eyes briefly before tugging his fingers through his hair in frustration. "Don't you understand that it doesn't matter _when _you modify it? If you stop time travel from being invented, right here, right now, whatever methods you use are still going to rip Time apart. There are some things that _can't _be changed, and this is one of them."

She stared at him, but something inside her seemed to give a little bit. He took a step forward, pressing, using every ability he could think of (that wouldn't make him feel like the Master later on, anyway) to get her to understand, to stop, to let Rose exist again.

"Trust me," he told her.

"Why?" she asked, but it seemed more out of reflex than anything else.

"I'm the Doctor."

-BAD WOLF-

Alice didn't entirely understand _why _those words reassured her, but they did. Maybe, she thought, maybe…

She chewed on her lip nervously. "You mean we don't… It's safe? It'll be alright?"

"It already has," he informed her, voice still quiet, melodic, persuasive. "Which is exactly why you shouldn't be trying to stop it from happening."

She stared at the floor.

"You could save him, you know."

Her eyes flashed back to his. "What?"

"Your friend. The one who died in the first test. He didn't have to."

She swallowed. "And that's not going to…?"

"Nah. It's not like you're trying to stop yourself from ever travelling in time to stop yourself travelling in time to—"

She waved a hand around a bit. Obligingly, he shut up.

There was a pause, and she thought for a moment that she could feel the universe tip around her.

"Okay," she said.

He let out a breath, closing his eyes, every muscle in his body relaxing—the movements almost imperceptible on their own, but the overall effect changing his appearance entirely. "Thank you," he whispered.

Half an hour later and some time earlier, her best friend was alive again—and so was his.

-BAD WOLF-

Out of the corner of her eye, Rose saw the Doctor finally turn and run for the TARDIS.

Good, she thought. He was safe this time, at least.

The Reaper crashed over her and she instinctively cowered; the world went black around her and there was the pressure and the screaming and the slick sharpness and _pain pain pain pain pain_; she heard her own bones shatter a moment before her nerves transmitted the fiery agony waiting inside the fault-lines. Her spine snapped and most of her body went unnervingly dead; still, it was better than how it had felt before. The crushing force transferred to her skull; there was a crack, she felt something give, and then...

Nothing.

And then—perhaps a second later or earlier or hours in either direction—she was standing in the middle of a street that wasn't deserted anymore, being stared curiously at by passers-by who hadn't even existed a few minutes ago.

_He'd done it._

Suddenly uncaring of the reactions of whoever else might be floating around, she shrieked in unintelligible joy before bouncing a few times on the spot. She couldn't see the TARDIS, but that didn't matter; he'd show up eventually. She was alive, he was alive, everyone was _alive _and—

—that wind wasn't supposed to be there.

Rose spun to face it, grinning maniacally as the magnificently blue space-timeship began to materialise.

-BAD WOLF-

It probably hadn't been a good idea to step away from the console before she was finished landing, but the Doctor was being impatient. Besides, if he started running _exactly _then, he would be at the door by the time it was actually existing enough to open.

He had forgotten about how most of the TARDIS's landings ended.

She shuddered suddenly as she dragged herself fully out of the Vortex, and the Time Lord found himself not only without anything to hold on to, but also in mid-stride; he collapsed in a rather messy and angular heap, barely missing the railing, and by the time he regained his footing and his dignity the door was already opening.

He tried to figure out how to care about that and failed, because there... there she was. Barely even pausing to grin at him, she whirled to close the door behind her; by the time she turned back around, he was there.

They collided, and it was perfect and laughing and a little bit clumsy (he wasn't sure which one of them hit the door, but the TARDIS glared at him a bit for it) and she was alive and she was here and she was…

Rose giggled breathlessly, clinging to him. "Missed me, then?"

"Well," he said. "It's not every day that your travelling companion gets eaten by a Reaper."

She tried to disentangle herself. He didn't help, and eventually she gave up. "How long was I dead?" she inquired, as casually as if she had been talking about… about… well, anything other than temporarily not being alive anymore. She was truly extraordinary, he thought, amazed by her yet again.

"Technically, you weren't dead at all, by the end of it," the Doctor answered, letting her go. He retained a hold of her forearms, though, not entirely ready to stop touching her altogether. He _had _lost her for a while there, after all. He had every right to be tactile.

She rolled her eyes at him, but was still grinning like a maniac, so he decided not to worry about it. "You know what I mean," she told him, hitting him lightly on the arm.

He was too giddy with her return even to feign hurt. "About ten hours."

"You'd think I'd been gone for weeks, with that reception," she told him affectionately. Wait. Affectionately?

"Well." He didn't really have an answer for that, so he didn't try.

She smirked, tongue slipping between her lips, and he was overcome with the sudden curiosity—

-BAD WOLF-

_DON'T YOU DARE._

-BAD WOLF-

Probably not a good idea, he concluded, and hugged her again instead. She squeaked.

"Alright," she said. "It's alright. I'm here, yeah?"

She was. She really, truly was, he thought delightedly, and finally put her down. Spinning away from her, he dashed up to the console, tried to calm down, and failed.

She approached, hand running absently along the railing. "So what happened, then?" she asked.

He glanced at her, again wondering slightly at how little her now-erased death had affected her. Normally, she would have been at least a little shaken… but then again, Rose Tyler was anything but normal.

"She went a couple of days back in the timeline," he said. "Made an alteration to the prototype, so it would explode rather messily when it was used instead of actually doing what it was supposed to do."

"She sabotaged it," Rose answered, confused. "Why? I mean, she wouldn't always have wanted to blow up the lab, right?"

"Nope," he answered, circling the console. "Not until her best friend died a horrible death at the hands of the first Vortex manipulator."

She winced.

"It's alright," he reassured her. "He's fine now. Talked with her a bit, convinced her that time travel wasn't all that bad, told her she could save him, and off she went."

Rose brightened. "Seriously? He's alive?"

"Yup!" he answered, smiling at her briefly before fiddling with one of the slightly more broken controls.

She returned the grin before half-skipping over and taking his hand. "That's it, then?" she asked.

"If you want it to be," he replied.

"I dunno about you, but I don't think I've died enough for one day." The Doctor winced, and she rested her head against his shoulder for a moment in apology.

"Shall we be off?"

She smiled, seeming almost to glow in the console's light. "We shall."

-BAD WOLF-

-fanfare- Wasn't that exciting?

There's more, though, that didn't fit in the episode itself. That extra bit will be typed up at some point or other and added to a separate story, which will be entitled Interludes. It'll just be used to house little extra bits that aren't really important, but I kind of want to write anyway. Oneshots, you know. Anyway, if you want to see, I'll tell you when it's up. ^_^

You know, for a climax, this isn't very… climactic. I'm terribly sorry about that. And… grah. Did I mention I don't like the next episode?

Anyway. Be well, everyone! –waves- See you next week.


	31. Before, part I

SO THIS IS MY BILLY-MAYS-HONOURING SECTION. NOTE ITS ALL-CAPS-NESS. I MISS HIM. :(

**Disclaimer:** If wishes were Doctor-Who-owning-thingies…

SIAPNIAN: Okay. You know my lovely and infinitely talented betas, yes? Specifically focus on TheDisturbedPoet for a moment. She has linked this fic to TV Tropes, under the FanFicRecs/DoctorWho section. This makes me very, very happy. :D I just thought you should know.

**Apology:** GAAAH THIS IS LIKE TWO WEEKS LATE NOW I AM SO VERY VERY SORRY GAH! –cowers- No death, please. D:

**Explanation:** So… By the time I got to Update Day, I sat down and I was like "I need to update." And then I thought for a minute and I realised that I couldn't because, quite simply, I didn't have an outline for this _chapter_, let alone the entire episode. So I took the week off to remedy that. And, err, apparently the week after that, although I somehow managed to trick myself into thinking I was only taking _one _week off… I have no idea how that happened. Actually, I do, but it's too long and weird to put down here. Anyway. After that, things came up—lots of things—and I was like grr, I still has no outline. THE FAIL. So I remembered how, a few chapters ago, I had said that I was going to update the first chapter of an episode on a Tuesday and not a Saturday, and I was like "You know, I think I'll do that." And on Sunday I sat down and outlined 2.5 chapters, and the rest started falling into place in my head, and now it's Tuesday and I'm FINALLY updating. Again, I'm really sorry. :( Dunno why you haven't killed me yet, but I'm really grateful for it. So… here goes. 1xwhateverx1. Enjoy.

**Non-Warning: **Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose's hair was still dripping slightly from the shower when she entered the console room, and she made a half-hearted attempt to wring it out while she patiently waited for the Doctor to notice that she was standing there. A couple of drops of water slipped past the grating and sizzled angrily against the TARDIS's circuits; the human winced slightly.

"Sorry," she whispered to the ship, who whirred forgivingly. She'd had worse; a little water wouldn't hurt her.

Rose grinned briefly at the ceiling and stroked one of the columns for a moment. (The thought intruded that her mum was right; she really _was _starting to turn into him. She still couldn't see why that could be a bad thing, though.)

It was around that point when the Doctor finally saw her, taking a cursory peek up from the wires in which he was entangled. He looked at her for barely half a second before he returned his gaze to the half-dismantled bit of machinery he was working on.

"Not warm enough," was all he said.

She was used to odd greetings from the Time Lord, but that one confused even her. "What?"

He glanced back up at her. "Your attire," he clarified, carefully enunciating every syllable before once again shifting his eyes to the wiring.

Rose glanced down at it. T-shirt and jeans; fairly acceptable, really, considering the kinds of places they usually ended up. Which meant…

"Where are we going, then?" she asked.

He beamed quietly, still not looking at her. "Can't tell you."

She glared at him ever-so-slightly, although more because it was expected than any real irritation with him. Surprises, when it came to him, were always interesting. Not always safe, mind—less safe, actually, than when the destination was known; she wondered, not for the first time, if that was the point—but always interesting.

"How cold is it?"

"Can't tell you," he sing-songed absently, sonicking something that sparked at him and sent the room into darkness for a couple of seconds. Rose, being used to such things, didn't react beyond an apologetic pat on the console.

"You're not helping," she said. "You say this isn't warm enough and then you won't tell me—"

He waved a hand at her, cutting her protests short. "Ask the TARDIS," he interrupted.

With a murmured exhalation that was probably rude in some fashion, she turned and vanished back into the corridors.

The Doctor, meanwhile, decided that he had fiddled enough and unceremoniously dumped the mess of wiring back into its original location. He bounced up and checked the coordinates again—they had a nasty habit of changing when he particularly wanted to impress her, as he'd learned fairly early on in their travels together. But no—they all looked fine. They weren't even a second off from what he'd originally programmed.

This unnerved him, and he looked at the time rotor worriedly. "What are you up to?" he asked the ship.

She didn't answer him, and seemed almost… pleased? Smug? Amused?

He blinked, shaking his head sharply and opting to ignore it. The TARDIS was behaving for once, and for all he knew, questioning her was only going to reverse that miracle.

-BAD WOLF-

Evidently, they were going to an ice planet. That was pretty much the only thing Rose could deduce, considering she hadn't needed to utilise anything like her current getup since they revisited Woman Wept; she wondered, much as she had the first and second times, how she was going to get to the console room without suffocating. The TARDIS attempted to lower the temperature on her journey, but it only managed to keep her from dying; anything approaching comfort was still very far away.

Finally, she managed to reach the Doctor. He'd been waiting for her, she could tell—most likely for much longer than he'd wanted to, but then that was hardly surprising.

"Much better," he commented as she walked in.

"Mm," she replied noncommittally. "Are you going to change or is your superior biology going to keep you from freezing to death?"

"The latter," he answered, as if it should be obvious.

"Right." There was a pause. "So are we going, then?" she asked, slightly confused. Usually, he'd already taken off by this time.

"Already landed."

"When?"

"While you were getting changed." He pronounced that almost dubiously, as if he couldn't imagine what had taken her so long that the TARDIS had managed to make a thirty-second trip while she was at it.

Rose thought, very carefully. She remembered a shudder and a bit of an echoed wheeze while she was in the wardrobe room, but… "I didn't even need to hang onto anything," she objected.

"Things that aren't in the console room aren't as affected by intra-Vortex turbulence," he said archly.

She raised an eyebrow at him.

"And… the TARDIS is in a good mood today." He scratched his ear absently. "Although I'm not quite sure why…"

Rose grinned triumphantly, opened the door, and stepped outside.

It was very, very cold. She felt her temperature returning to normal and exhaled happily for a moment before walking further. The Doctor followed her, quietly closing the door behind them as she glanced around, trying to find any identifying marks on the landscape.

"Where are we?" she finally asked, not having been able to figure it out on her own.

The wind caught at the Time Lord's coat as he stood beside her, close enough for their shoulders to touch. She suddenly wished she could feel it beneath all the layers of highly-advanced whatever she'd been swathed with.

"Earth, second-century," he told her. "Antarctica." He glanced over at her as she slowly turned on the spot, quietly marvelling. "No one's seen this before," he continued. "We're the first."

She gave a breathless sort of laugh. "Not quite the first," she corrected, pointing.

He turned to look.

There was an entire city on the horizon behind them.

-BAD WOLF-

So Yeah. Sorry this was late, I made it a bit longer in apology, stuff's happening and everything is wonderful. And I love you. Despite my late-updating-ness. D:

Oh, and, again, TheDisturbedPoet (whose fics I hereby recommend, BTW) put me on the Doctor Who Fan Fic Recommendations page on TV Tropes. I feel special. ^_^

Be well, everyone!


	32. Before, part II

I have lemonade! Also, congrats to… err… whoever it was who got the 400th review. –is too lazy to find out- :D And thank you to all of you for getting to 400. I am full of squee.

**Disclaimer:** Amusingly, TheDisturbedPoet and I have an OC!Doctor which I suppose we do, technically, own, but… The canonical bits are being a bit more troublesome in that respect.

SIAPNIAN: I love _Half-Life_. Have I ever mentioned that? 'Cause I do. SO MUCH. (So much that it's causing characterisation errors. –sulk-)

**This Is Totally Not An Apology, TCASM:** …stuff happened. I suck. I've created a new system which may or may not work.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor stared at it for a second.

It sat there and existed.

He blinked.

It stubbornly refused to vanish, fizzle or otherwise prove itself to be anything but completely real.

He said something extremely rude. Rose snickered slightly and he strongly suspected his ship was doing much the same.

"Every time," he muttered to no one in particular. "_Every _time."

"Don't worry," his companion commented, almost absently threading her arm through his. "I'm used to it by now."

The Time Lord sulked. He was very good at it, having had an indiscernible number of centuries to practise.

"'Sides," she continued, "cities that aren't supposed to be there are just as exciting as being the first to see something, yeah?"

He glanced over at her, foul mood dissolving with alarming rapidity. "You are a thoroughly amazing human being," he informed her. "Have I ever said that?"

She looked away, licking her lips nervously. "About as often as you've said the opposite of my entire species," she replied, an odd note to her voice that he couldn't quite identify. Before he had the chance to think about it, though, she spoke again. "So," she said. "Shall we go and ask the nice people why they exist?"

"Why are you automatically assuming they're nice?" He thought. "Why are you automatically assuming they're people?"

That got a laugh. "Shut up."

There was companionable silence for a few moments as they began to walk. Rose eventually slid her hand down his arm to tangle their fingers together (inasmuch as she could considering the clumsy gloves the TARDIS had provided. At least they weren't mittens, though; the timeship was kind enough—and knew her occupants well enough—to be sure of that). The Doctor gave her a brief smile.

Rose, in her myriad travels with the Time Lord (all of him), had necessarily picked up several of his traits. One of these was a distinct discomfort with silence, and it didn't take long before she spoke again.

"Do you recognise it? The architecture," she clarified. "Any idea who it is?"

He inhaled, seeming slightly reassured with the return of speech. "It's difficult to tell," he said. "Used to be a spaceship, but they've scavenged… basically, whatever they can find to add onto it. The basic structure narrows it down to about… five thousand species? It's an escape capsule, essentially," he continued before she could question him further. "Refugee camp. Whoever's in there is running from… something, using an emergency shelter. And since those are built for practicality, and this one's a bit haphazard…"

"…it's harder to figure out who built it," she finished automatically.

"Exactly. We won't know for sure until we actually get there."

"More fun that way?"

He grinned. "Knew I brought you along for a reason."

She playfully hit him, and they went on.

-BAD WOLF-

_They sicken me sometimes, you know. As if Rose and the original Doctor hadn't been bad enough… Why do you think I only bother to keep an eye on them when they're in trouble? It's not just because it's more exciting, you know._

_Mortals and their emotions. Bleh._

_Anyway, before you ask, the temporal anomaly they are currently investigating is not my fault._

_Oh, don't act so surprised. You can't blame everything on me, you know, no matter how inclined your species may be to do so. This time, it's not my fault; it's theirs. Specifically, his—she still doesn't know the kind of damage she's doing. He does, though, even if he's choosing to ignore it at the moment. This was one of the many events their wilful shattering of Time has changed; I just directed them towards it. If this doesn't even get the Doctor doesn't realise what he's done by keeping her… well. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do, but I'll think of something. And it won't be pleasant._

_Speaking of things that aren't pleasant, there's a massive one happening in my home universe right now—and it looks like it's going to take a while to fix… The Master's always been insane, but this is just…_

_The good news, though, is that—in some way, because of this particular… adventure's long-term nature—it doesn't require constant attention. Which is rather refreshing, really; the Doctors seem to have a nagging tendency to get in trouble at the same time. I'd probably have had Rose back home by now if not for the necessity of watching both of them at the same time._

_I checked the timelines again; there's still no sign of Davros in any universe that actually matters. Either the damage to Pete's World is severe enough to cause temporal illusions of that size and complexity, or that was a false timeline planted by someone very good at spaciotemporal manipulation. "Good", of course, meaning "possibly even better than me", as if such a thing is even normally possible. But the point still stands that I should have been able to spot the trickery right away, but it was so well-hidden from me that I didn't even question it until I found out that it erased too easily._

_This worries me, for obvious reasons. As if I didn't have enough to worry about… But I certainly don't know who would even want to do something as apparently useless as all that, much less who actually did it… hmm._

_I really hope it's just a Rose-related side-effect. Otherwise, things are even more complicated than they already are._

-BAD WOLF-

It was very, very cold.

Rose hadn't really noticed it at first, what with the puffy advanced stuff the TARDIS had provided, but even that succumbed after a few minutes. At least the Doctor, superior biology and all, was starting to look a bit chilled as well; if he hadn't, she might have considered hitting him.

He looked worriedly over at her, as if sensing her thoughts. "Are you alright?"

She squinted forward. The city-camp-capsule-whatever else he had called it—which, in hindsight, _did _look rather like a spaceship with random bits stuck on in odd configurations—wasn't too far away now; only a few minutes, she guessed, at the most.

"Yeah," she answered."

"Are you sure? We could go back to the TARDIS—"

"City's closer."

"…Right. I could go to the TARDIS and—"

"Don't trust your driving."

He scowled. "I'll have you know that we landed _exactly _where I was aiming this time."

"Right. The rest of the world was what got it wrong."

"Exactly," he agreed, evidently not noticing her sarcasm.

She snorted lightly. "Are you sure you can do it again? 'Cause being stranded in the middle of Antarctica isn't exactly high—" she slipped slightly to the side, unsteady, but quickly regained her balance—"on my list of priorities right now," she finished.

"Short hops are easier. Besides, the TARDIS likes you."

"I'm fine," she insisted. "Really. Better when I get somewhere with actual heating, but fine."

The Doctor was skeptical, but kept quiet on the subject. "It's not the middle," he said eventually.

"What?"

"Antarctica. We're not in the middle. It's… well. It's not particularly pleasant there, and at this point in history, this area should have done just as well."

Rose smiled, looking at the ground. He really was an amazing creature in any universe, wasn't he? Well, not _every_ universe—surely, somewhere out there, there was a Doctor she wouldn't get along with particularly well, but she doubted there was one she wouldn't…

She cut that thought short.

However the Doctor might be in other parts of the multiverse, at least she hadn't landed too far off from the original when it came to this one. The rest of the universe might still feel alien and harsh to her, even now, but… being here might not be so bad. As long as she was with him.

The thoughts, and the sudden burst of warmth they prompted, startled her—although she wasn't entirely sure why. He _was _the Doctor, wasn't he? And, well, a few things might be a bit different, but it was nowhere near as drastic as when he'd regenerated. And she'd gotten used to that change, too, eventually. Why should a smaller alteration have the opposite effect?

Rose closed her eyes briefly. She'd been scared many times in her travels with the Time Lord—all of him—but never like that.

She shook herself. With any luck, she wouldn't have to go through that again. He was very good at not dying, and her lifespan was comparatively miniscule. As long as she herself didn't end up killing him (again), she wouldn't have to worry about seeing another regeneration.

A thought wandered in and took up residence: Why was she assuming she'd spend the rest of her life with him? His parallel, her Doctor, had invited her to do that, once—but not this one. Even then, that had been after over a year of traveling with him. She was assuming—

She wasn't _assuming_ anything. She was, however, getting incredibly sick of rogue notions jumping into her head and questioning the Doctor. She trusted him. She did, whatever the rogue notions might say, and that wasn't about to change anytime soon.

Rose wondered for a half-moment whether she was under some sort of telepathic influence before all her thoughts on the subject were erased from time.

-BAD WOLF-

_Sometimes I wish my host was a bit less observant. I need to be more careful, evidently; I'm generally better at disguising myself, but… well. Of course, it doesn't help that her ideas are starting to become so alienated from my suggestions. If I don't get one of them to figure out what they're doing very soon… The Doctor's already half-gone, although that hardly surprises me. He's a sentimental old fool who's been alone too long. But Rose… I would have thought she'd go about things differently. I didn't expect her to give up on the real Doctor so easily. Normally she wouldn't have believed him when he said it was impossible, but… I suppose there's a first time for everything._

_Still, it worries me. The Doctor's pretty much a lost cause; if Rose gets too close to following his example and getting too attached… Well, let's just say that I'm not very optimistic about the prospect of convincing the real Doctor to see the semi-obvious._

_Hopefully, though, someone will come to their senses before I have to resort to anything drastic._

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor was still concerned about Rose, but kept quiet about it. Besides, they were close enough to the modified spaceship that, in a very small amount of time, it wouldn't matter.

Still, he hadn't expected to be out here for more than a few minutes; go outside, be the first to touch that part of the world, get back in the TARDIS and figure out where to go next. Wandering around for thirty-two point nine minutes had definitely not been part of his plans.

Not that that was particularly surprising. Plans had a habit of unraveling around him and what was that?

He ran over to the suspicious-looking lump, ignoring Rose's startled inquiry in favour of just getting over there as quickly as possible. After a moment, he heard her annoyed huff and rapid footsteps following him.

The Doctor knelt next to the form, desperately hoping that he was wrong for once and it wasn't a body.

It was. To be more precise, it was two—the pale, skinny, blue-grey humanoids were frozen solid, embracing tightly in what surely must have been a last-ditch effort to save themselves from the cold.

Rose breathed something unintelligible, hand briefly twitching to cover her mouth in horror before she composed herself and knelt beside him. He said nothing. There was nothing to be said.

A moment passed, then another.

"Millocks," he said quietly.

"What?"

"They're called millocks. These people. They come from a planet… ooh, halfway across the sector. What are they doing _here_?" he questioned, trying to ignore what had happened to these particular members of the species. "Much less now? At this point in their history, they shouldn't even be curious about this system…"

Rose carefully looked at him and not the bodies of the dead millocks before her. "Well, we're not gonna find out just sitting here."

The Doctor nodded. "Right." He stood up. "Let's just hope they like us more than them," he muttered. She nodded in mute agreement and they went on.

The nearest door-like object wasn't very far away, although the prospect of getting inside it was slightly more bothersome—it was flat and grey, with no particular protuberances or markings indicating controls. In the end, the Doctor simply tried knocking. There was a faint, clicking whirr from above, but nothing else.

He had just fished his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and started preparing an excuse for breaking in when the door calmly slid open on its own.

"Sorry about that," came a slightly muffled voice. "Norw said he'd picked up heat on the sensors, but I thought… Anyway, come in. Quickly. It's freezing out there."

"Hadn't noticed," Rose said under her breath as they entered the airlock. As soon as they were inside, the door behind them slammed shut with an ominous clang. She flinched at the unexpected noise, unconsciously shifting closer to the Doctor. No matter how harmless the millock letting them in sounded, the point still stood that he'd opened the door for them and not the two creatures frozen outside; maybe they weren't killing them _yet_, but she fully expected that to change. It generally did, whether she expected it to or not; she might as well be prepared for the semi-inevitable.

The millock spoke again, sounding slightly annoyed. "Sorry, the inner door's just a bit… stuck. The cold tends to wreck the mechanism…" A pause. "There we go."

The remaining door slid open and uncomfortably hot air flooded out, washing over the duo in the airlock. Rose shuddered suddenly, grateful for the warmth but wishing there wasn't quite so much of it.

A figure appeared in the doorway. "Sorry," apologised the figure again. "Like I said, the cold… We weren't expecting to land here."

"Well, you're not the only one," the Doctor commented lightly, wandering inside. His companion hesitantly followed, not wanting to be left in the airlock but certainly not keen on the temperature. Inside the TARDIS it had been bad enough, but clearly millocks were built for much warmer climates than either humans or Time Lords.

"I really don't believe it," said the figure. He—well, the voice was certainly masculine, although Rose had long ago learned that that didn't necessarily mean much—had four arms, one pair of which was folded neatly behind his narrow back. He was about her height, with pale blue skin and six dark eyes that blinked in unison. His skull was sharply angled and he had no nose, but past that, he looked surprisingly human. She wondered, again, why that was; while there was certainly a wide range of distinctly _in_human species, the majority of sentient aliens always seemed to be humanoid in shape. "Are you _from _the planet?"

The Doctor started examining the ceiling for no readily apparent reason. "She is. I'm not. You said you didn't expect to land here?"

The creature—she really had to ask his name; this was getting rather inconvenient—blinked. "Well, no," he said. "We were aiming for… well, somewhere that wasn't frozen, but the navigation was off. We suspected the Erd, of course, and while we aren't in any danger from them _now_, we still haven't been able to fix the ship."

The Doctor suddenly went very, very still.

Rose gave him a worried look. "Doctor? What is it?"

"I'll tell you later," he murmured distractedly.

She bit her lip a bit. "Right, um." She turned to the millock. "What's your name?"

"Ren."

Excellent. "I'm Rose. I don't suppose there's anywhere I could put this?" she asked him, indicating her fluffy overclothes. "It's a bit hotter in here than it is outside, and…"

Ren jerked into awareness. "Of course," he answered instantly. "Sorry. There should be a storage container somewhere around here…"

He turned and started examining the walls, stroking random parts of them and looking in the resulting compartments, and Rose took the opportunity to turn to the Time Lord.

"So?" she asked. "What's going on? Why are you looking like the world's about to end?"

"Because it might be," he said softly.

She looked at Ren, who was still rifling through the walls and muttering. "What do you mean?"

"The millocks are currently in the middle of a planet-wide civil war between the Tunn and the Erd. Some of them, like these, decided to run and hide off-world until the fighting died down—it's actually how most of their colonies got started."

"So what's the problem?"

"The fighting isn't due to start for at least six thousand years. These are refugees from a war that shouldn't have even _happened _yet."

-BAD WOLF-

…huh. I have absolutely nothing to say down here. Err…

HALF-LIFE IS AMAZING. OMR. –thud-

…yeah, that's it. Sorry about the delay. –hides from TCASM- Again. –sadness- I do love you all. Really.


	33. Before, part III

Huzzah for only being two days late this time! My system is working, as I'm sure you'll be glad to hear. ^_^

**Disclaimer:** -sulks-

SIAPNIAN: Why are English snacks so much more delicious than American ones? –flail of epic fangirlly squee-

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose took a moment to let that sink in. "Oh," she said eventually. "That's… bad, then."  
"A little, yes," he answered impatiently. "And it makes things almost infinitely more complicated. Not only do we have to worry about the millocks being where they probably shouldn't, but something's fracturing the Vortex. And the sorts of things that can do that… are not that easy to find."

"Any ideas as to what's doing it?" she asked.

He let out a shaky breath. "One," he replied. "And for all our sakes, I really, _really _hope it's wrong…"

She was prevented from questioning him further by Ren's return. "I found an empty compartment," he informed her. He seemed slightly flustered and she wondered why.

"Thanks," she said, and began trying to extricate herself from the now-oppressive overclothing. She itched to know what it was the Doctor had been talking about, but doubted he would tell her in the presence of the millock, so she kept quiet.

"As soon as you're done," Ren said, "I'll take you to the Overlord. He'll be wanting to meet you; like I said, we didn't think we'd see any of your species down here."

"Her species," the Doctor corrected unnecessarily.

"It's the only good thing about this part of the planet," he continued, ignoring the Time Lord. "Less chance of people coming in and being bothersome. Not that you're being…" he hastily clarified. "Anyway."

Rose hid her smirk, amused. She was also, coincidentally, done with her self-appointed task, and Ren therefore directed her to the aforementioned storage cell. It was a struggle getting the stuff to fit—the mess of whatever-it-was looked to be almost Rose's size even without an inhabitant—but she managed it. There was a brief pang of fear as the panel clicked shut—if the millocks retracted their hospitality with any kind of murderous intentions, she would freeze to death in fairly short order—but she shook it off. If she didn't dispose of it now, she'd die of the heat long before she had to worry about the alternative.

And besides, there was no guarantee that it would even come to that. The immediate problem might be easily resolved—or there might not even be a problem at all, come to think of it.

She scoffed lightly as she started walking back to the Doctor. As if things were ever that simple when it came to him. Simplicity—along with peace, quiet, and a general lack of dramatic crises—was one of those things that seemed to avoid him whenever possible.

Speaking of him, he was looking at her rather intently. Unnerved, she frowned at him. "What?"

He blinked and shook himself. "I'll tell you later," he said absentmindedly.

Ren glanced between them for a moment. "I notified Lord Ehn," he said. "He's expecting you."

"Well," the Doctor replied instantly. "Wouldn't want to keep him waiting."

The millock paused. "He's not known for his patience, no," he hedged.

Ah, Rose thought. A leader not known for his patience and a Time Lord not known for his tactfulness. This was going to go _wonderfully._

-BAD WOLF-

_Finally, the idiot creature gets it! I was wondering how long that would take. And as soon as he's proven right, he'll really have no choice but to return her to her proper universe before her very presence destroys everything. This is perfect!_

_I'm kind of surprised, really. At that rate, I was worried he'd never get around to realising it at all, let along following my orders and giving her back. It's strange, not having to get him to notice the obvious anymore… I'd half-expected he'd blame the Daleks or the Valeyard or… I dunno, the Weeping Angels. Something, at any rate, that would enable him to completely miss the point. Again._

_Thankfully, though, the fact that he's carting around a woman not even native to his universe—and getting her involved in fairly important events in his timeline—seems to have been clear enough for him to understand. Even if only just. He does have a talent for missing the obvious…_

_Anyway, the fact that he's finally getting it is a relief. Things can only get easier from here._

_Q? …why are you laughing?_

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor sincerely hoped that this was going to be easier to resolve than he suspected. If the temporal breach was already big enough to displace a major war millennia backwards in time, he really needed to start looking for its source. Instead of, for instance, trying to deduce exactly how much of a threat to his adopted homeworld the millocks were going to be.

Unless, of course, the aforementioned source was walking beside him at that very moment, whereupon…

Whereupon he'd find out why her presence was being troublesome, fix it, and carry on travelling with her. If she was even the problem, which she might not be.

At any rate, whatever errors she might be causing would necessarily spring from the fact that she wasn't from this universe; he'd probably just invited her on board before this world had acclimated to her. And that would be easy to repair without hurting her or the Vortex. …probably. It sounded like a simple enough thing to do; he'd… well, he'd never actually done it before, but he knew it _could _be done, and that was enough. Besides, what with some of the things he'd ended up doing to the timestream in his sleep (quite literally), he'd surely accomplished spatiotemporal alterations more complex than that. Whatever she was doing—if she was even doing anything—could most likely be easily fixed.

And what if there was nothing to fix? What if his universe simply wouldn't stand for her at all? He'd have no choice but to—

_No_. He wasn't leaving her.

The resolution disturbed him with its force and suddenness, and he quietly decided to ignore it in favour of trying to figure out what sort of creature the millocks' leader would be. He could worry about the state of the Vortex later.

A distraction arrived in the form of Ren stopping before a rather imposing-looking door.

"He's in here," he told them. For a moment it looked as if he wanted to say something else, but instead he simply typed something into a panel off to the side and stepped back.

The Doctor and Rose walked into the room and the door slid shut behind them. He really wished they wouldn't do that so often or so unnervingly. He liked his nerves. They had served him well on many occasions.

And mentally rambling about his biology and its usefulness wasn't helpful with regards to the task at hand.

The room was long and brightly-lit, but somehow managed to give the illusion of being dark. Two millocks stood at the far wall on either side of a hexagonal chair; both were heavily armed, and one looked like he desperately wanted a nap.

The Doctor sympathised with him. He generally did when it came to guards who weren't out for his blood (yet); he always thought their jobs must be dreadfully boring. Whiling their lives away standing near things and looking stern; no wonder they were so easily upset. The poor creatures were probably so in need to mental stimulus that they'd shoot someone just for the excitement—if it weren't for the paperwork that necessarily followed such an action.

Also not helpful, he reminded his brain. He forced himself to focus on what they were actually looking after and not the guards themselves.

The inhabitant of the chair was fairly large for his species, both in height and girth, and possessed of a faintly green tint that spoke strongly of chronic indigestion. His eyes were a flat black that absolutely refused to reflect light in any way, and he bore himself with something the Doctor could only describe as "controlled malevolence".

This didn't bode well.

"Ah," he said—Ern, wasn't it? No, that couldn't be right—as soon as he noticed them. "The mysterious aliens. Come in."

The Time Lord wanted to point out that, technically, they already had, but decided against it. Contrary to popular belief, he did know when to keep his mouth shut (whether or not he obeyed that knowledge was another matter entirely), and Ehl—no, not that either—didn't seem to be the sort who liked to be contradicted, even in a matter that thoroughly insignificant. Antagonising him would just make things worse, and he needed to get out of here and fix the Vortex as quickly as possible.

They took a few more steps into the room.

"Now. What are your names?" he continued. "That _neerhv _Ren neglected to tell me."

"_Neerhv?_" Rose mouthed at him.

He shook his head. _Not now,_ he thought at her. Despite being from a species not known for its telepathic prowess, she seemed to understand.

She probably didn't want to know the precise definition of the word anyway.

"I'm Rose," she told Elr—no—, who looked slightly irritated at even the few seconds' delay. "This is the Doctor."

"I asked for his name, not his title."

His companion gave a breathless laugh. "If he has a name besides that, he hasn't told me."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Indeed? Well." The millock shifted in his chair. "I am Lord Ehn," he informed them. Ehn! There it was. "Tell me—what are you doing here?"

"We were just…" Rose fumbled for the right word.

"Passing through," the Doctor supplied.

"Passing through," she agreed. "Saw your station, thought… why not?" She grinned at him in a manner that was cunningly designed to be reassuringly harmless. It would have worked, too, if its target had been human.

Or Gallifreyan, as it turned out—if the Doctor didn't already know _very _well that the opposite was true, he would almost have considered her harmless himself. She was _good_. He wondered absently if she'd picked that talent up during her travels with his alternate or if it had been instilled in her at Torchwood.

"Where is your ship?" Ehn inquired lightly. He didn't like that tone. It worried him.

Rose looked at him. Of course she would; hmans were so easily lost. "About half an hour… ooh… that way," he answered, pointing in almost exactly the wrong direction.

The millock's expression crystallised. "That's interesting," he said, "considering the only alien technology anywhere near here was picked up some distance over there." He indicated the TARDIS's actual position with a wave of one of his upper hands.

Hehe. Upper hands.

His words abruptly sank in and the Time Lord's amusment faded. Ah, he thought. "Ah," he said. "Blue box? Very difficult to open, not that I'm accusing you of trying?"

The millock nodded. "Don't worry about it," he said. "As soon as we found it, we sent a transport out to retrieve it. It's quite safe now."

Damn. "Thanks," the Doctor lied. "Sorry about the confusion; must have gotten turned around. Place like this…" He trailed off, indicating with a wave of his hand the corridors and their potentially-confusing nature. At least, he assumed they were potentially confusing; it took a lot more than a few twists to baffle his sense of direction.

"Quite," Ehn said coldly.

"So," Rose said conversationally. "Why'd you come here? 'S not exactly the nicest place in the universe. Looks pleasant enough, but…"

"Nonsense," the Doctor interrupted. "It has penguins in it. You can't hate a place with penguins."

She gave him a look that could only be described as dubious. "It's _cold._"

"Hadn't noticed."

"We did not _intend _to land here," Ehn ground out, evidently tired of being ignored. "Our ship was sabotaged. Those believed responsible, however," he continued more cheerfully, "have been adequately disposed of."

Rose, evidently, had rather quickly tired of the idea of diplomacy. Not that he could really blame her. "What, by being chucked outside and left to die?" she snapped.

The Doctor winced internally. She was right, of course, but… Well. He supposed the Overlord would have found a way to be upset at them for something anyway. Might as well get it over with.

"They could have killed us!" the millock replied sharply. "They probably would have, if it hadn't meant their deaths as well as ours."

She bristled, but kept quiet.

"Anyway," the Doctor continued, hoping to divert the conversation to something closer to the point. "What brings you to this part of the galaxy? I didn't think any of you were going to head this way."

"Which is precisely why _we _did."

He considered this. "Fair enough. And… how long are you planning on staying? You're fine _now_, obviously—humanity won't be technologically advanced enough to notice you for centuries—but eventually, someone on this planet's going to see you."

"When did I say we were going to leave?" Ehn replied mildly.

"Well… come to think of it, you didn't, but you'll need to."

"Why?"

"The planet's not yours, Overlord," Rose said.

Ehn looked at her. "Not yet," he replied. "But with a few modifications, I'm certain it will serve admirably."

The Doctor spoke again. "I can't let you do that," he informed the millock smoothly.

"I didn't expect you to," he replied in kind. "Which is why I'm afraid we have to part company now. Rather permanently."

Rose gave a slightly exasperated sigh. "Every time," she muttered to herself. "We're just trying to _help_," she added, addressing Ehn again.

"I doubt it. Gan?" The more alert-looking guard glanced up to indicate that he was listening. "Find that idiot Ren and get him to put them outside."

It figured that they wouldn't even get to be escorted by the one who looked like he was about to fall asleep anyway.

-BAD WOLF-

Again, YAY FOR ONLY BEING TWO DAYS LATE. This is happiness to me. :D Sorry it's a bit shorter, but… well… sorry.

Hello again! –waves- How is everyone?


	34. Before, part IV

O hai!

**Disclaimer: **Somewhere out there, there is a universe where I do own DW. That universe is a happy one that is full of joy and huggles and cookies. ^_^ Unfortunately, this is not that universe. (Also, the word "qo'or" is TheDisturbedPoet's.)

**Totally Not An Apology:** …yeah… -shame-

SIAPNIAN: I just want you all to know that Sheldon Cooper is taking over my mind. Seriously. He's in my head. It's… slightly unnerving.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed, to no one's great surprise, by TheDisturbedPoet.

-BAD WOLF-

Well, this was a familiar and not-entirely-unexpected turn of events. Rose made a kind of exasperated sighing noise, glaring at the walls momentarily as she walked.

She wasn't particularly worried. She and the Doctor got into these kinds of situations all the time, and they hadn't died yet. Well. Not permanently, anyhow. Unless one counted regeneration as a kind of dying…

At any rate, convincing them not to take over the planet was going to be a lot easier without having to worry about silly things like tact and diplomacy and otherwise not upsetting them too much. The Doctor wasn't particularly good at those kinds of things (except when he was), and Rose had found that she didn't have the patience for them herself most of the time. This, of course, being one of those times.

Ren was leading them through the corridors (and she wished the base's layout made more sense, but it was all sharp corners and weird angles—what idiot had designed the place?), and therefore had his back to them; she wished she could read his expression, figure out exactly how helpful he could be if it came to that. He certainly seemed somewhat more reluctant to chuck them outside than he was to take them in, but one never really knew. Particularly with aliens—while some things were universal, body language did have a tendency to change between species. Just because he was humanoid didn't mean she could read him.

Her eyes flickered to the Time Lord beside her. Despite his clear annoyance with the things, she was fairly sure he had some kind of plan; he generally did. The question was, of course, what it was and exactly how good it would be. Gan didn't look like the sort of person who would have any particular qualms about shooting them; she was unsure about Ren, but honestly, did it matter?

Did she recognise this corridor? She wasn't sure that she did. Of course, she wasn't sure that she didn't, either—this was an exceedingly confusing spaceship. Either way, whatever the Doctor was going to do, she hoped he would do it soon. Preferably _before _they got to the airlock.

She stared at him, hoping to catch his attention. Being Rose, she managed it in fairly short order, and he looked at her with a kind of puzzled frown.

She wished she was telepathic. As it was, she could only attempt to convey her impatience via facial expressions. Thankfully, though, he seemed to understand, nodding a little before looking away.

Or, then again, maybe he _didn't _understand, as he was showing no sign of actually doing anything. Irritated, Rose was just preparing to start staring at him again, but he spoke before she could.

"Ren," he said quietly. The millock twitched slightly, half-turning his head before seeming to remember that he probably wasn't supposed to.

Rose looked back at Gan worriedly.

The Doctor ignored him. "You heard Rose and I talking, you _know _you're not supposed to be here."

She narrowed her eyes at him. Ren could hear them? If she'd known… well. It may have unexpected benefits, though.

It may even have been part of the plan all along, she considered. The Time Lord was annoyingly good at doing things like that, just in case something like this happened. Still, he could have told her. She wasn't sure why he could have told her, or what the point of telling her was, but he could have told her.

The millock was silent. Rose heard the quiet noise of a gun charging and winced.

"Doctor," she murmured, willing him to shut up.

He didn't listen. "This is wrong," he continued. "Something's happened, and you know it has, don't you?"

"Be silent," Gan snapped.

Unsurprisingly, he didn't. "Ren, I can help. I'm probably the only person who can, let alone—"

The Time Lord cut off with a strangled noise and abruptly crumpled, landing on the floor with an unsettling lack of any attempt to catch himself. Almost before he had hit the ground, Rose dropped to kneel beside him, fruitlessly trying to make sure he didn't injure himself further on the hard surface beneath them. For a few stunned moments, there were no thoughts in her mind, only a screaming kind of terror; her hands fumbled for him, turning him over; if he was—

"Ow," he said, faintly.

She let herself breathe. Her fingertips lingered on his face for a few moments, just to reassure herself that he was really conscious and alive and not as injured as she feared, but she sat back on her heels and glared at Gan with a deep fury.

"That," she said, "was—"

"Non-fatal," Gan interrupted calmly.

Seething, Rose opened her mouth again. How could he _possibly _know that? Admittedly, Time Lords had more safeguards than humans did (usually), but what if—

"The next one won't be."

Although it rankled her severely, she kept quiet, instead helping the injured Time Lord back to his feet. She gave him a concerned look; he replied with a tight smile that did not at all reduce the anger still quietly blazing through her. Rather than being reassuring, the expression only reinforced the idea that not only was he in pain, but he wasn't even seeking pity for it.

Whatever the Doctor had in mind for Gan, she hoped it involved something rather unpleasant. She had a brief fantasy involving beating the creature into submission with a solid, pointy object. A crowbar, maybe…

She also hoped that either he'd managed to persuade Ren over to their side, or that he had a backup plan. He might know Venusian whatever-it-was (even though he didn't use it very much anymore), but she didn't, and she doubted he would be much use in his current state anyway.

Rose spared a parting glare for Gan before she was forced to start walking again.

-BAD WOLF-

_He'll get over it. It's hardly the first time he's been shot for not being able to shut up. At least this time the talking actually had a point, and a fairly valid one at that._

_You know, they don't seem to be needing my help very much this time. Which is good, actually. A little strange, but good overall; the other Doctor—our Doctor—is… well. Not doing a very good job of keeping himself out of danger, certainly. And what person in their right mind names a spaceship after the Titanic, anyway? Well, Leovinus, I suppose. But whether or not he was in his right mind is debatable._

_Not sure what to think about Astrid. She might not be so bad if she didn't seem so set on attacking his face… Ah well. It's a fairly simple problem to erase. I don't even have to kill her. Er, much._

_She might be a decent replacement companion for the alternate Doctor, I suppose. Maybe. I'll have to think about that. But if he's a good boy and returns my host, I am going to have to find another creature for him to wander around with before I seal off that universe. I suppose I might as well start thinking about it now._

_Oh, and making sure the original Doctor doesn't get himself killed, of course. Which is harder than it sounds—the second he doesn't have someone following him around all the time, he gets dreadfully careless. It's rather upsetting, really._

_If his parallel doesn't figure out what's going on very soon, though, I'm going to have to find a temporary companion for him. I can't look after him all the time, not with also having to play with events in Pete's World and what the hell is the stupid Time Lord doing now?_

_Gah. I have to take care of this. He's being stupid again. Let's just hope that his parallel doesn't get any ideas while I'm gone._

_Ooh, look, a forklift…_

-BAD WOLF-

Being shot hurt, as it turned out. He'd known it did, of course—Seven _particularly_ did, which was probably the start of his later incarnations' distinct dislike of guns—, but he'd tried very hard to forget exactly how much.

Of course, he wasn't in any danger—the weapon hadn't even hurt as much as it _should _have on that setting (his biology was almost infinitely more advanced than they could possibly imagine, after all). But… still. His nerves fizzled slightly and he felt a bit jumpy.

Jumping (or any movement that was particularly sudden and/or involved the use of his spine, which still stung), as it turned out, would most likely be a bad idea. Which was partially why that symptom was so frustrating.

He was going to be fine, though, which was the important thing. The _more _important thing was that Rose was fine (she'd probably be unconscious, if she were him. Which she wasn't.); the most important…

He looked at Ren.

The most important thing may or may not have worked. There was no way to find out at the moment, though. If it hadn't… Things might get a little difficult, but if it came down to it, he'd probably manage to escape without even having gone through the airlock.

Even if they _did _go through the airlock, they'd get back in. There was no other option. He wasn't about to let Rose freeze to death as a result of something that shouldn't even have _happened._

Which might have been her fault. Well, theirs. Well, his. She couldn't really help existing. He eyed her curiously; he'd have to take her back to the TARDIS to fully find out about that particular problem, but he might be able to at least look over the timelines…

He did so, briefly. He even managed not to trip while he was actually at it, although the results of the peek made him come close.

The temporal signatures were all wrong. Tangled. Slightly too red.

This, he thought, was bad. He would definitely have to have the TARDIS scan her. Even if she wasn't what was displacing entire wars, she certainly wasn't helping…

…but she was staring at him.

He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but it worked out about as well as the previous one, so he stopped. She narrowed her eyes at him and he indicated with a shake of his head that discussing it at that moment wouldn't be a good idea. Her expression cleared, eyes flicking in Gan's general direction for a moment before she returned her attention to the task at hand.

They were almost at the airlock. He needed to be working on a backup plan or _something _that would keep them from getting killed, but all he could focus on was the fact that his companion's timelines weren't… right. Which meant that she could be the problem. Which meant…

…that he'd just have to find a way around it, he reminded himself. Everything was going to be fine. It would just be a bit complicated for a time. As soon as they were out of this, he'd figure out what was going on, stop it. There was no need to panic.

He did worry, though. It could just be a blip, an error, something that might even revert on its own—or it could be something else. He really, really, _really _hoped it wasn't something else.

If she had been anyone else (well, not anyone, he supposed, but all the same), he wouldn't have been concerned. But she was Rose Tyler, and she had a habit of getting him concerned about a great deal of things. Mostly her relative level of safety and happiness, the former being marginally more important. Marginally.

They were at the airlock. They were at the airlock and he didn't have a backup plan in case Ren decided to be unhelpful, which could very well be the case—given more time, the Doctor was sure he could have convinced him not to kill them, but just having the span of a few sentences… Anything could happen. He could conceivably have made it _worse_, although he highly doubted that.

Still. He was good at making things up on the spot. Spot-thing-maker, that was what he was. He'd gotten out of worse things without even as much of a plan as he had right then…

…and he should probably figure out how to replicate that effect, because Ren was typing something into a little computer that had come out of the wall and the inner door was beginning to slide open.

Right, he thought uncomfortably. Time for Plan B. Or, as it was more generally known, improvisation. He tried to find a way to surreptitiously reach for his screwdriver; even when it wasn't of any kind of practical use, it was—

Rose, evidently fed up of waiting for him to do something, burst into motion. He watched, slightly dumbly, as she whirled on Gan. The woman was _fast_; neither alien saw the attack coming.

Unfortunately, as wonderful as the element of surprise was, she had next to no practical skill in unarmed combat, and the creature managed to wrench two of his arms free in fairly short order. The Doctor lunged for them, unsure of what he was going to do but absolutely certain that he couldn't do _nothing_, but wasn't quite quick enough; millocks were fast, and before he had the chance to even form a proper reaction, Gan had managed to neatly immobilise his attacker. Faced with the prospect of a rather upset alien pointing a gun at his companion's head, the Time Lord was forced to back up and look like he wasn't going through alternate plans in his head. If he could get his screwdriver out quickly enough to… but even a temporal distortion wouldn't…

There was, he realised with sudden clarity, nothing he could do.

-BAD WOLF-

Okay, Rose thought, so that didn't work out as well as she had hoped. Not that she had been expecting it to, at least not for long; she'd simply assumed that the Doctor could probably find a momentary diversion helpful.

She hadn't expected her attack to distract him as well as her intended target. And now she was uncomfortably certain that she was about to be shot (fatally this time), and her resident lifesaver looked just as much at a loss as to what to do as she was.

She wiggled, trying to escape, but found herself quite efficiently trapped; three of Gan's arms were occupied with holding her still and the fourth was holding a gun. "Qo'or," she muttered fiercely. Under different circumstances, she would have expected the Time Lord to react—both in surprise that she knew the word in the first place and in annoyance that she still couldn't pronounce it—, but as it was, she wasn't surprised that he just kept standing there.

She looked at the ceiling. If she was actually going to die here (and, although she'd always managed to wriggle out of these kinds of situations before, it was always a possibility. Just because near-death experiences lost their thrill after around the fifth time in a week didn't mean they weren't still near-death, and just because the Doctor was skilled and she was lucky didn't mean they were invulnerable. She'd learned that the hard way.), she wasn't about to let the last thing she saw be the most powerful being she'd met personally looking utterly helpless.

She felt Gan shift, let her eyes slip closed. If anything was going to save her, she estimated that it had to happen in approximately three seconds.

_One,_ she thought. …_Two. …Thr—_

There was a sharp sound, a faint hum of electricity, a sudden starburst of pain—and the millock behind her crumpled. As he was still holding her still, she did too, landing half on the floor and half on him. Still hissing slightly from the brief shock she had received and absolutely baffled as to why she was still breathing (although certainly not protesting), she scrambled to her feet.

Her eyes landed first on the Doctor, but he was staring with equal intensity at Ren, so she turned and looked at him instead. He was shaking and looked a slightly paler shade of blue. He was also, coincidentally, holding a gun pointed at Gan's (unconscious? Dead?) form.

"Thanks," she said after a pause.

Ren stared at her, eyes wide. "I couldn't—" he said. "I—oh, they're gonna kill me…"

The Doctor found his voice. "We're not going to let that happen," he said quietly.

"Come with us," Rose added. "We can help."

He shook his head vehemently. "They'll trace my biochip straight to you if I do," he said. "But… they can't register any lifesigns that aren't attached to one of those things. If you're alone…" He swallowed. "They'll have to hunt you manually."

She bit her lip. He'd just saved her life—she wasn't about to leave him to… well, knowing these people, probably to be chucked out of the airlock himself. "Can't we… I dunno, make it look like it wasn't your fault?"

The millock shook his head again. "All weapons are genetically locked. If anyone who isn't supposed to touches them, they get…" He gestured a bit and mimicked a vaguely electrical noise.

"Doctor? Can you deactivate it?"

He considered it for a moment. "I can try," he said eventually, taking out his sonic screwdriver. Ren looked unsure, but eventually held his gun out for inspection.

Rose looked worriedly at Gan. He looked to still be breathing; he was very unconscious, but she didn't know how long that would last. After a moment's hesitation, she grabbed one of his arms and started dragging him into the airlock.

Ren stared at her. "Wh…?" he asked.

"Don't worry," she interrupted. "I'm not throwing him out or anything." Having finished her task, she returned to the hallway. "'S just… I don't want him coming after us. Or you. Can you lock him in there?"

The millock looked slightly uncertain. "I suppose," he hedged, "but I'm getting in trouble either way…"

"It'll buy us some time," the Doctor commented, still patiently sonicking the gun. "That… should… work." Gingerly, he touched it, then picked it up. "Yup. No zappage."

Ren blinked at him, then moved to the panel. After a moment, the airlock slid shut again, trapping the still-unconscious Gar inside.

"You're going to need to shoot me," he commented.

There was silence for a bit. "Sorry?" the Doctor eventually said.

"He's right," Rose told him. "If we had escaped without his help, we wouldn't want him to follow us." She inhaled. "Give it to me."

The Time Lord grimaced.

She ignored him. "It's set to stun, yeah?"

Ren nodded.

"Then it's fine," she said, taking the weapon, examining it for a moment.

"The trigger's on the side," the millock said helpfully.

"Thanks." Rose finally managed to figure out how to hold it. "Sorry about this," she added.

He stared at it with a kind of fascinated horror, as if only just realising what it was and what, therefore, was going to happen next. "It's okay," he said faintly, sounding like he thought it was anything but.

"We'll come back and get you," the Doctor told him. "When all this is over."

He nodded again, and Rose shot him as politely as she could manage. He fell, and they took off running as soon as he hit the ground.

-BAD WOLF-

I just want you to know that I was originally going to end this on a horrifyingly cliffhangery cliffhanger, but decided against it. Because I love you and this is terribly late.


	35. Before, part V

Well… I was _almost _on time… That's what I get for not listening to mental!Sheldon, I suppose. And now it's time for COUNT THE SHOUT OUTS! :D

SIAPNIAN: …You know, I had something I was going to say here. And then my brother walked in and started trying to get me to continue the SG-1-watching quest and I forgot what it was.

**Disclaimer:** …technically speaking, I don't even own the voice in my head. (Long story. Well, short. But it's not particularly interesting, so I won't bother you with it.)

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet. 'Cause she's awesome and puts up with me spamming her with stuff.

-BAD WOLF-

_What? They actually managed to get out of a potentially-deadly situation without my help? That's new. And kind of nice, really. I was getting sick of looking after them all the time._

_Oh, you noticed? Good. I like it when you're observant. It means I don't have to take care of you on top of everyone else in the multiverse. …okay, maybe not everyone else in the multiverse. …okay, really only a very few people in only two universes. But that's not the point. Now can we please get back to making sure the people in question don't get themselves killed in fascinatingly gory ways? Thank you._

_…where was I?_

-BAD WOLF-

The millock hit the floor with a disturbingly satisfying crunch-thud kind of sound, and Rose fought the slightly insane urge to blow imaginary smoke from the end of the phaser. She figured that the Doctor would probably be slightly less upset by its nature if she didn't actually call it a gun. So far, it had almost worked.

"You are having way too much fun with that thing," he grumbled.

She grinned. "A bit."

He raised an eyebrow at her and didn't comment. Instead, he picked around the unconscious alien and started scanning the walls with his screwdriver. Evidently he found something promising—he walked over and started poking at a tiny panel that had given way under the sonic examination.

"So what's the plan?" Rose asked, pulling the millock off to the side (no sense in leaving him where he could be tripped over. That was just cruel) and going to look over the Time Lord's shoulder. He'd found a computer, evidently—well, she assumed that was what it was; the lights were changing too quickly for her to even see if they were words or just pretty scribbles that presumably meant something important.

"I'm trying to find the mainframe," he said, distracted, abruptly pulling his glasses out of his pocket and putting them on. "Hack into the ship's computer."

"And then what?"

There was a pause. "Not sure. Hadn't got that far."

She wasn't particularly surprised. She also wasn't surprised that this Doctor in glasses-sonic-focussed mode appeared to have much the same effect on her as the previous one, and very carefully kept herself from staring.

It made sense, she supposed. They were the same person, after all. Mostly. They certainly _looked_ identical, and almost all of their behaviours were exactly the same. It was only logical that she'd find herself just as… distracted by this one as she was by the last, and really, she thought with a sudden ferocity, what was wrong with that? It wasn't as if she was going to get home now.

Maybe.

Rose closed her eyes, mentally shook herself. That, she told herself firmly, was just being ridiculous. Again. What was going wrong with her thought processes? They'd been inherently odd over the past few…

…however long it had been since she started travelling with the Doctor again. It was hard to say; it wasn't as if the TARDIS had a calendar. Or, indeed, anything that could be thought of as a fixed day. She wasn't even entirely sure how old she was anymore.

"Hah!" the Doctor proclaimed triumphantly, interrupting her musings. She jumped a little, startled.

"You found it?"

"Let's find out," he replied with a decisive flick with the screwdriver. "I either just unlocked the door to the computer room or turned off all the lights in Level 25." He grinned goofily at her. "Wanna find out which?"

She smiled. She couldn't help it. "Okay. But if you got it wrong, you're making the tea when we get home."

Rose hadn't meant to say "home". Honestly, she hadn't. But his boyish delight only seemed to grow at her use of the term, and she found that she honestly couldn't think of another word for the ancient timeship.

"'Kay," he agreed cheerfully, and set off.

-BAD WOLF-

_Bang._

_Bang, bang. Bang._

A pause. Footsteps shuffling about on the airlock floor.

The sore and very irritated Gan managed to find the computer panel after a few moments of searching (he was very rarely near the area, after all; it wasn't exactly anyone's favourite haunt, and he had better things to do). Frowning slightly, he tried to remember his access code.

He remembered a string of numbers and, hoping it was the right one, entered it. His head hurt; he'd been shot before, obviously, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing that one got used to. Especially when the one doing the shooting was supposed to be on your side.

He growled quietly. He'd never really liked Ren in the first place, but he'd assumed that the creature was primarily harmless. The worst thing he could have done would be… well, would be letting people like those aliens on board.

He hadn't even thought that he knew what to _do _with that gun, let alone be able to aim well enough to hit Gan and not the captive.

Maybe that had been a mistake, he thought. If he'd been aiming for the girl and missed… but no, he'd ended up in here, and the aliens wouldn't be able to operate the airlock.

Oh, he was going to kill him.

The computer wasn't accepting the code, citing a locally-initiated lockdown as the reason for it.

He was _really _going to kill him.

He tried pounding on the door again, but there was still no one around to hear.

Well, he thought, he could either sit here for who knew how long waiting for someone to notice that he was missing (and actually look in the right place), or…

He lowered the power level on his weapon and shot the panel. At the very least, he thought, the energy fluctuations might _finally _draw the attention of—

The door grumbled and slid open.

It really was a silly design flaw, but that was most of the rest of his species for you. He wasn't inclined to protest their incompetence this time, though, considering it had actually been helpful for once.

Ren was unconscious, slumped rather ungracefully against the wall. Well. It was only fair.

Now, if he could just get him to a working airlock… It would probably be easier just to shoot him, but it would be infinitely more satisfying to let him freeze to death. And just as inescapable.

As entertaining as it would be to see exactly how long it would take his compatriots to figure out that something was wrong, there really wasn't time. So, deciding to speed things along a bit, he patched a quick warning through the computer system before grabbing the unconscious millock's arms and dragging him away.

The nearest exit was only two halls away. He probably wouldn't even wake up in time to find out what was going on.

Pity.

-BAD WOLF-

The journey was worryingly quiet until the alarms went off. The Doctor allowed himself to relax; a lack of eardrum-shattering noises meant, in his experience, that whatever was trying to kill him was attempting to sneak up on him without him noticing. Not that that worked anyway, but he much preferred it when they chose a more direct approach. It was easier on everyone.

It also, coincidentally, generally got him to defeat them more quickly. He'd do anything to stop those kinds of shrieks. He supposed that was probably the point. Unfortunately, in his case, it backfired. …Well. Lots of things backfired around him. It was one of the reasons why he was so phenomenally good at… well, at this.

"We've been spotted," he said unnecessarily.

"Yeah, I noticed," Rose replied, but she took his hand and they started running properly. If he remembered correctly (which he did, of course), the mainframe should be just… about… here.

Quite abruptly, his companion stopped running and shifted her grip on his hand. Startled, he allowed himself to skid to a rather unsteady halt without overt protest. She presumably knew what she was doing.

She did, as it turned out. A brief peek around the corner evidently revealed something; she whirled out of sight of it, back pressed to the wall.

He gave her a curious look. She made no answer, instead adjusting her grip on the stolen weapon and darting into the hall.

Three shots—two of which were hers; the third hit the ceiling behind her, evidently fired more out of reflex than anything else—pierced the air, and she relaxed.

"'Kay," she said. "I got them all. I think."

He still didn't _like _guns, but he grudgingly admitted that—in this very specific case—they were somewhat helpful. At any rate, he doubted Rose would take very kindly to him complaining about it more, and having seen her in some of her more violent moods, antagonising her would not be a very good idea.

He shuddered lightly at the thought.

The two millocks she had obligingly ambushed for him had, in fact, been guarding the mainframe. While he hadn't expected that they'd let the heart of their computer go completely unwatched, he did acknowledge that her method of dispatching them was a lot quicker than whatever he would have ended up doing. He still wasn't convinced that she wasn't telepathic, and had taken up the habit of mentally praising her whenever possible. Particularly when she was armed.

He hadn't, in fact, turned all the lights off on Level 25, and the door only took the slightest attack with the sonic to open. Rose, after quickly checking that no one else was about to shoot them (yet), stepped into the now-open room and made an appreciative noise.

It wasn't a room, technically. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, were all parts of the computer itself—screens and wires and bits of circuitry, carefully tucked behind force fields for protection, but still within ready access if the need arose.

"Right," the Doctor said conversationally. "Here we go. Rose—" He threw her a small, cylindrical object and she instinctively caught it. Human reflexes really were amazing, he thought fondly.

She stared at the device for a moment. "This is a new screwdriver," she said dumbly.

Human information processing, on the other hand… "Yes."

"What happened to the other one?"

"Nothing."

She blinked uncomprehendingly at him. "Then wh—"

Obviousness it was, then. "It's yours," he told her.

She stared. "You made me a sonic screwdriver?" she asked, voice oddly small.

"Yes," he said curtly, "and I'll be happy to discuss the schematics with you as soon as the room isn't about to be flooded with things trying very hard to kill us."

She gave him a quick nod, turned, and locked the door. Satisfied, he turned to one of the screens.

"Settings are the same," she mused as she approached him. "That's good, at least. Took me forever to memorise them the first time."

He was only half-listening. "I need to get into the navigation system," he told her. "Reprogram the engines to take them somewhere else."

"Okay," she said. "Anything I can do to help?"

"Yes." He turned to face her—she was much closer to him than he'd thought, and that gave him pause. Her eyes, he thought, really were the most fascinating—

She was waiting for him to speak.

"Can you get into the security systems?" he asked her.

Rose smirked and waved her newfound screwdriver under his nose. "I can now," she said smugly.

-BAD WOLF-

The computer was almost startled to be brought to life again so soon. It had been under the impression that the engines were going to be powered down for some time… there was something distinctly odd about the change in plan, but whenever it attempted to gather information about _why _the orders were being changed, the process abruptly cut off.

Well, so much for that, then. It went through its personnel database, tried to figure out who was doing it. Three of them were outside, one of them still alive, but it could worry about them later. Now… was anyone official inside the mainframe?

…no. There were some _outside_ (unconscious all—probably a result of the internal suppression field being on, although it couldn't remember activating it… or altering the programming to target millocks…), but whoever was getting inside it wasn't authorised to be there.

That sorted that, the computer thought, and tried to flood the chamber in question with its emergency supply of neurotoxin.

Nothing happened.

It tried again.

Still nothing.

It quietly began to panic, but there was nothing to be done but accept the new orders… and search itself for one specific member of its personnel and a blue box giving off incredibly confusing readings.

-BAD WOLF-

When Ren awakened, the ground was shaking and he was having mild difficulty feeling his extremities. It was very cold, he thought sulkily.

Cold.

He jerked upright, fear coursing through him. Sure enough, he wasn't on the ship anymore. He was very much not on the ship anymore. And if he didn't find a way to—

He suddenly remembered that bit about the ground. There were very few things, in his experience, that would do that, and one of them meant that he wasn't going to get home anytime soon.

He turned around and watched, dumbfounded, as the ship neatly folded itself up and proceeded to remove itself from the atmosphere.

Well, he thought, whatever the Doctor had ended up doing to fix whatever had gone wrong, it had worked. Apparently. But, he thought with increasing panic, he had said he would come back and get him. Ren remembered that _very _clearly (he had, after all, been trying to focus on things that were not the gun being awkwardly pointed at his chest). But this wasn't a rescue of any kind.

Maybe they couldn't find him. Maybe they were looking for him on the ship.

Maybe they weren't coming.

He had just started to give up hope when the TARDIS started to materialise in front of him. He blinked—twice—but she only became even more visible, and he was just wondering if he was having some kind of immediately pre-mortem hallucination when the door opened and Rose poked her head out. He caught a sight of a room far, far, _far _too large for the exterior behind her; his brain abruptly rebelled at the sight and he decided to focus on something else.

"Hi," she greeted him, and then winced. "Eugh. Forgot how cold it was. Anyway, come on. Don't want you dying on us." She darted back inside.

Feeling more than slightly dazed (okay, he was _definitely _hallucinating), he stepped over the threshold and into the spaceship. Which was, as it turned out, just as big—if not bigger—on the inside as it had looked. He had the sudden urge to go outside and circle it, just to make sure, but it was dreadfully cold out there and Rose had shut the door as soon as he was past it.

"Sorry we took so long," the Doctor said conversationally from where he was playing with the console. "We ran into a couple of obstacles."

"One of which being your inability to fly this thing," Rose remarked as she made her way up the ramp. He glared at her, but she grinned brightly at him and looped her arm through his. He rolled his eyes a little, but seemed to forgive her with alarming rapidity.

"This is your spaceship?" Ren asked, staring at the ceiling like it was going to realise there was no room for it there at any moment.

"Technically, timeship with spatial conveyance abilities, but for all intents and purposes you're right. She is our spaceship."

Timeship? he wanted to ask. She? he wanted to ask. Instead, he just stood there and said absolutely nothing at all.

Rose inhaled. "So," she said. "Have you got any family, or… anywhere we can drop you off where you won't get executed for treason or something?"

He shrugged. "Not really." There was probably _somewhere_—he was just fairly sure that it would be on an entirely different planet from anyone Ehn could possibly have notified. The Overlord might have be many things, but forgiving was not one of them, and he had a disturbing tendency to overreact.

All he did was shoot a superior and help a couple of random aliens have free range over the ship. It wasn't _that_ bad.

…sort of.

"Shiny," Rose said, thoroughly delighted.

Ren didn't quite understand what's particularly incandescent about any of this, but he didn't argue either.

-BAD WOLF-

It was a bit tricky getting the right year (after all, the timeline of an entire species had been corrupted almost beyond recognition), but he finally managed it.

"Three hundred and twenty-seven years since the Tunn lost—sorry about that, by the way," the Doctor hastily added.

Ren shrugged.

"According to official records…" he examined the screen momentarily, "oh look, you _were _executed for treason. Ah well."

He shrugged again, looking slightly unsure about where this was going.

"Anyway," he continued, whipping his glasses off and putting them in his pocket, "point is, you don't exist. Officially. Not here."

The millock blinked at him, comprehension beginning to dawn on his features.

"Now, if you _really _want, I can drop you off somewhen else. Or somewhere else, if you'd rather. But right now, your species is at the edge of a golden age that is going to last hundreds of years, and I thought… you'd like to see it."

"Don't worry about fitting in and stuff," Rose added. "Just say you were… I dunno, born offworld or something."

The Doctor grinned proudly down at her.

Ren appeared to have been rendered speechless. The Time Lord wasn't particularly surprised; he probably hadn't even known time travel existed a few minutes ago (although, considering how the timelines were behaving, one never really knew), after all, and now…

"Anyway," she continued, "thanks. Would have died back there if it wasn't for you." And then she hugged him, which was slightly difficult what with the number of arms involved. But she was Rose, and she was stubborn, and she managed it anyway.

-BAD WOLF-

Ren was gone, they were back in the Vortex, and a thought struck her. Well, two, technically; but the second one frankly scared her, so she decided to ignore it for the time being.

"Doctor?"

"Hmm?" He was primarily occupied with taking the console apart (again), but he didn't seem _completely_ distracted, so she carried on.

"Why'd you make me a screwdriver?" The other you never even thought about it (as far as she could tell), she almost added.

"I was bored," he said candidly. "Not much else to do while you're sleeping. And after that incident with the water… well."

She thought. "'Kay," she said. It made sense. "Well… thanks."

He gave her a bright, startling smile. "You're welcome."

Well, that was the first subject over and done with, and in nowhere near as much time as she'd been hoping. She hesitated.

"'Kay. So… why was the war all… misplaced—"

"Displaced."

"—and stuff?" She bit her lip, unaccountably nervous.

He stilled. "Yeah," he said. "I did say I had a theory about that, didn't I?"

She nodded. He was avoiding the question, she noted with rising panic. This couldn't be good. It could be many things, but "good" was not one of them.

He turned to face her. "I thought… that it might be you."

She felt slightly lightheaded. She knew it, she knew it, she knew it… "But… you can find out, yeah?"

"I could," he agreed.

"Then why don't you?"

For a split second, he looked absolutely terrified—and then the familiar I'm-actually-somewhat-upset-but-I'm-trying-to-hide-it expression took over, and he nodded a little before stepping forward.

She consciously tried not to hyperventilate, instinctively backing up a little, reaching behind her and taking hold of the railing for support. She also tried to ignore the slight flutter between her lungs—really, this was not the time to be all human and… human and stuff; she could have been ripping the universe apart—and was almost successful.

He didn't really seem to be doing anything, which was incredibly unnerving. He was just… standing there, staring at her in this distant/focussed way that kind of made her brain wibble a bit. She knew he was looking at her, but it didn't _feel _like he was, or maybe it did, or maybe—

She stopped thinking about it before she gave herself a headache.

A few seconds passed, then another few seconds. Suddenly, his gaze cleared, and he snapped his eyes from her and turned away.

She swallowed hard. "Well?"

There was silence for a few moments. "I was right," he said, and for the first time she could immediately think of, he didn't sound happy about it. At all.

She closed her eyes and suddenly he was there, in front of her, hands on her shoulders and voice loud and frantic in her ears.

"Rose," he said, "look at me. Listen to me. Whatever's gone wrong, I'll fix it. Worse things have happened and I fixed those. Now, I don't know why this universe is rejecting you—"

"How can it be rejecting me?" Her voice was slightly higher-pitched than normal, and she winced, but she was _scared_, dammit, and if the entire universe was trying to ignore her existence then what was going to happen next and what if she had to go back home and she didn't want to go back and what if

"—but I'll find out." He stared at her, eyes dark and intense in the semi-light, and she found herself believing him a little bit. "I am not," he continued, "going to lose you. Not without a fight."

-BAD WOLF-

_Oh, really? Well. We'll see about that._

-BAD WOLF-

Originally I wasn't going to give her a screwdriver, but… well… ^_^ I couldn't quite help myself.

Hi, everyone! How are you?


	36. The Lone Angel, part I

I am really tired and kind of hungry and a bit undercaffeinated. This is going to end well.

**Disclaimer:** No.

SIAPNIAN: I've been thinking of branching out into TBBT-fic. This intimidates me. –eep-

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet. Shocking, I know. (Also, give her a hug—she's awesome, for one, and she made me lengthen this, for another. ^_^)

-BAD WOLF-

_I doubt he realises how incredibly stupid he's being. I'll give him some credit; he's stubborn and surprisingly talented in the art of temporal manipulation (even considering his species), but that doesn't mean he's not an idiot. In this case, it actually means he's being even more of one than he could have otherwise…_

_At this point, I wish I could say that I was surprised, but I'm really not. You know how he is when he doesn't get his way. Just because you're half a millennium old doesn't mean that you're mature._

_It's just… It isn't fair. I had all of this planned out. It was perfect and simple and would have left everyone happy, and now he's going around messing that up and absolutely refusing to admit that maybe, maybe it might be better if he stopped fighting._

_But he's still the Doctor, and he doesn't give up. Which is all lovely and inspirational when it isn't ruining my plans._

_My._

_…perhaps if he knew exactly what he was fighting, and that I really do know what's best for both of them… Well. What's best for her, anyway. I'm beginning to wonder if he even deserves me being nice and giving him another companion._

_But still. He doesn't know who I am, but Rose does. And if she knows I'm behind this… hmm. She took my name as a sign that she could return to her Doctor once before—maybe it'll work again._

_It deserves some thought, at least. And I'd rather take a chance on her figuring out what's going on than him._

_She'll listen to me. She always does. …usually._

-BAD WOLF-

"What's wrong with her?"

The Doctor turned to look at his companion, befuddled. This was, he noted with a slight measure of sullenness, not unusual nowadays; it seemed that every word that came out of Rose's mouth either delighted or confused him. The mood whiplash was going to kill him one day, he was sure of it.

Still, it was better than not having her around at all.

"What's wrong with who?" he asked.

She nodded towards the console. "The TARDIS," she said. "She doesn't sound right."

He forgot, sometimes, how much she knew about him—and, by extension, his ship. But it wasn't as if the old girl was _sick_, not blatantly so; certainly not enough for a normal human to pick up on… but since when was Rose ever normal?

Maybe this wasn't just her previous escapades with sort-of him. He'd had people who travelled with him for years and couldn't detect a deviation half as faint as the one she had heard. Someday, he'd have to find out about that…

But not today. He circled the console, flipping switches, looking impressive. "Partially a couple of errors in the Vortex," he said. "Always makes her a bit queasy. Also, we haven't passed by a rift in a while."

She swallowed, staring wide-eyed up at him. "Errors? Like… the ones I've been making?"

He raised an eyebrow at her. "You're hardly the only thing that's going wrong with Time, Rose."

"Well, yeah, but…"

"Point is," he interrupted, wanting to snap her out of her brief melancholy, "she's desperately in need of a… refuelling, I suppose you could call it."

"Cardiff?" she asked, brightening somewhat.

He grinned. "Oh," he said, "if you insist."

-BAD WOLF-

There was movement.

Not that anyone saw it—that would have destroyed the entire point—but, still. Shadows shifted crazily over the walls for a half-moment, the faint rustle of feathers over brickwork.

A pigeon, unexpectedly roused from its sleep, turned its head in exactly the wrong direction and the motion stopped as abruptly as if it had never been. But, the bird noted with no shortage of confusion, _surely _it had been on the other side of the…?

Oh well. Stranger things had happened. It tucked its head under its wing and promptly forgot about it.

The movement continued, unhindered, searching. It was easier at night; there was less prey, of course, but that wasn't exactly a bad thing. It could not, _could not _be seen. Everything would come crashing down and it would starve, slowly, paralysed to the last.

Not here, though. Here, only a select few knew what it was. Here, practically no one knew that it _should_ be fought, let alone how to go about it.

Cemeteries, it had learned, were particularly useful—but it couldn't stay in any particular place for very long, or one of the aforementioned very few people might notice. It had heard of what had happened to the others.

And so it migrated, the temporal distortions of the Cardiff Rift calling to it. Such a fracture would make disappearances less noticeable, and its influence over the timelines of those around it made for more satisfying sport. Of course, it attracted other abnormalities—abnormalities that might be dangerous even to such a creature as that—, but as long as it didn't stay long, it doubted it would be caught.

There—there was someone, alone, wandering in the dark. He didn't have as much potential as it would have liked, but the Rift had definitely left its mark on him. And so it shifted, stalking him, darting from ledge to ledge to avoid too much suspicion. Identical statues on every other building were distinctly strange, but humans had overlooked odder things.

It sensed that it was about to be noticed and rapidly threw its hands over its face. Froze. Waited. Waited. Waited.

It wouldn't be long. It never was. That night was not an exception.

He blinked. It pounced.

-BAD WOLF-

Insert theme music here!

Bit short—sorry about that… rawrgh. Angst. Is "it's really frelling hard to write from the perspective of an Angel" a valid excuse?


	37. The Lone Angel, part II

You know, I think Shenelope is pretty much the first (technically) non-canon pairing I have shipped. This is a pivotal moment.

**Disclaimer:** …-runs sobbing into the corner-

SIAPNIAN: I have tea! It is excellent.

**Non-Warning:** You already know who betaed this. :P

**Reminder: **This is a parallel universe. Any canon-tweaks are… uhh… totally intentional. To, y'know, add to the… atmosphere? …um… yeah. Whatever's wrong with this chapter, I meant to do it. –innocent look- (Translation: I haven't watched Torchwood past the first episode and Jack wouldn't be there in this timeline anyhow.)

**SHAMELESS PROMOTION TIEM: **Okay. You know Brona19, yes? I beta for him and he is awesome? He has a fic. Which is shiny and doesn't get read enough. It's a Doctor Who/Babylon 5 crossover, but knowledge of the latter is not required (which is helpful, as I haven't watched that yet), and it involves… well… awesomeness. So Yeah. You should read it.

-BAD WOLF-

As it had really been an inordinately long time since the timeship's last visit to the Rift, she'd have to be there for a while. And that was alright, Rose thought; running around and getting into trouble was wonderful, yeah, but… Every now and again, it was nice to just stay—by choice—in one spot for a bit and not have to worry about getting shot at. So, when the ship materialised, she was looking forward to a long day of just that.

She really should have known better by now. For the past few years of her life, it had been repeatedly pounded into her brain that _the Doctor = trouble, Cardiff = trouble, Rose Tyler = trouble, therefore the Doctor + Rose Tyler + Cardiff = all hell breaking loose._

Actually, it wasn't so much _all_ of hell this time. More like just a fragment of it. The… squeaky, strangely cute frog-like fragment that bred like tribbles and had been kept in a ridiculously inadequate cage.

In a spaceship that had gone through a… rather rough landing.

The multicoloured tentacled things that owned the spaceship—and therefore the tribble-frogs (what had they called them? Giz… g… whatever)—had happily volunteered to assist in the tracking and capture of the creatures. Which would have been fine if they hadn't been multicoloured tentacled things on a planet that hadn't even figured out that first contact had happened ages ago.

Or just didn't want to admit it. Humans were good at that and when had she started criticising her own species?

Anyway, whatever else happened, the aliens couldn't exactly go running around. The area around the Rift might be slightly more used to odd-looking things wandering about, but it was probably still a bad idea. Rose had contacted the impromptu Torchwood team that had been monitoring the Rift and they were being very helpful in their own way, but in the end she was still left chasing an alien frog down the street.

She took some comfort in the idea that the Doctor was being forced to do the exact same thing. Not much, though.

The creature, seeming to understand that it was going to be quite efficiently trapped if it kept going that way, gave a panicked croak and turned around, barrelling towards Rose as quickly as its odd little legs would take it. Luckily, though, she still had the instincts from her days of catching strays (her mum's cat-flap-related procrastination was proving to be quite helpful after all). The frog put up a valiant effort, but couldn't quite evade her.

"Doctor!" she shouted, her arms very full of terrified alien pet. "I've got one!"

She heard his answering shout, although she wasn't entirely sure what he was saying. Either way, she wasn't going to be able to figure out where he was and hold the giz-whatever at the same time, so she just flopped to the sidewalk and waited for him to show up.

Her phone rang, startling the frog. She growled a bit, resting her head against the wall. Her mum _would_ call her when she had absolutely no way of answering without letting go of a surprisingly adorable alien creature…

The Doctor rounded the corner, chirped a greeting, and took the frog from her.

"Thanks," she mumbled, digging her phone out. "Hello?"

It was her mum, as it turned out—not that anyone else was in the habit of calling her very much while she was "travelling". She patiently reassured her that she was perfectly fine, the Doctor was fine, they hadn't been tied up and dangled above a volcano for a week and a half (actually true this time), he was taking care of her, she was taking care of him, etc. etc.. She had pretty much memorised the first two minutes of all such conversations, so she could afford to dedicate half her attention to watching the Time Lord attempt to stuff the tribble-frog in one of his pockets.

Rose caught a now-familiar grating squeak and scrambled to her feet.

"I've gotta go," she interrupted. "Found another one."

"I haven't talked to you in days—"

"I know. Look, just… uhh…" He had managed to get most of the creature in his coat and, therefore, had a hand free. "Talk to the Doctor for a minute, okay? I'll be back in a sec."

He valiantly tried to protest, but she unceremoniously deposited the device in his hand and took off running after the sound. She really, really hoped he wouldn't say anything stupid. He probably would, but… still. She hoped.

Another squeak. She froze, listening, watching, waiting…

Something small and green-grey darted across her vision, and she burst into motion. She hoped it didn't run too far—her sense of direction wasn't _that _good, and the Doctor had her phone. Although she supposed he could probably track her biosignature or something. Didn't the TARDIS key have a unique… something?

She'd worry about that later, she decided. The frog gave a panicked croak and sped, ungainly legs momentarily tripping it, into a narrow chink of space between two buildings. Rose gave an annoyed huff and followed. At least, she thought, there probably wouldn't be an exit.

There wasn't—but there also wasn't a tribble-frog. There weren't any windows or other similarly-disguised escape routes, and unless it had spontaneously sprouted wings, there was absolutely no way it could have gotten away. It just… wasn't there any more.

The area, however, was not entirely empty, and Rose ignored the issue with the frog in favour of examining the object before her.

It looked like an angel. Not figuratively, either—there was… a statue of an angel just sitting there in front of her, covering its face with its hands. Who would put a statue _there?_ Why?

Maybe, she thought, it wasn't a statue. Maybe that's what had happened to the frog. It had touched it, or gotten too close to it, or something… Weirder things had happened. Just in case, she backed up a couple of steps so that she was well out of range.

She didn't know not to blink.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor had valiantly tried to keep up a normal conversation with Rose's mother, but slipped up after he was asked how many near-death experiences they'd had in the previous week. Lying, he told himself, was a very useful skill to implement in such situations. Unfortunately, he hadn't thought about it until after the words were out of his mouth.

In his defence, he _had _been distracted. Gizka were not the easiest things to shove into a pocket, after all, even if that pocket was dimensionally transcendent.

Even so… She'd hung up forty-seven seconds ago and his hearing still hadn't entirely recovered, but he doubted he'd be getting much sympathy from Rose. She didn't like it when people upset her mother—and, unfortunately in this case, her definition of "people" included aliens.

He wasn't looking forward to their next visit with Jackie, in any case, and how long had she been gone? He frowned, a little concerned. Suddenly, he recalled her mild inability to walk while holding gizka—maybe she'd caught it and just couldn't tell him.

No, no, no, he thought. This was Rose. She was probably causing a revolution on a planet a thousand light-years away by now. The woman was as good at finding trouble as he was. Which was, he considered with some amusement, probably why they'd run into each other in the first place.

He slipped her phone in his pocket and set off in search of her, hoping that for once in her life she hadn't wandered too far.

-BAD WOLF-

_Hmph. Well, this could be interesting. Which is, come to think of it, not a good thing—the Doctors are once again utilising their incredible talent to get into trouble at the exact same time. And the original one doesn't even have a companion right now… I'm trying to rectify that, of course, but they just keep on missing each other. It's infuriating._

_Anyway._

_Altie—I quite like that name; I think I'm going to use it—is a bit stronger than I thought. I'm going to have to actively mess things up to keep her from getting properly absorbed in that world. He'd be no match for me if we were occupying the same universe, of course, but with me distracted and having to influence things from across the Void, he has a chance. I hate to admit it, but he does._

_I can fight just as dirtily as he can, though. More so, because at least I can cover my tracks. I probably won't actually harm the timeline right now; things are going to get tangled enough as is. But I do know quite a few things that our dearly beloved alternate doesn't, and I think it's time I started bringing those into play._

_He can't keep her there if she chooses to go, after all._

-BAD WOLF-

Rose opened her eyes and abruptly crumpled, nausea and a sudden, piercing headache momentarily incapacitating her.

She groaned, curling up on the floor, trying to focus on the reassuring chill of the smooth tiles and not the overwhelming urge to vomit. She _hated _time travelling without a capsule; she always came out the other end feeling like…

Her eyes shot open. Time travel without a capsule.

Without the TARDIS.

Ignoring the uncomfortable lurch of her stomach, she scrambled to her feet and frantically examined her surroundings. She was definitely on Earth (in someone's kitchen, to be slightly more precise), and definitely surrounded by recognisable appliances—maybe she'd only travelled in space… But no, there were tiny changes, little idiosyncrasies in the shape and size and colour of things. Other people might have been able to remain in denial, to assume they were just in the remarkably well-preserved house of someone who hadn't bothered to change anything for several decades, but she knew what being in a different time felt like. She knew the symptoms.

She also knew that without the Doctor or the TARDIS, there was no way back home.

Rose sank back to the ground and rested her head on her knees.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor was starting to get seriously worried. Normally, when she wandered off, there were helpful signs indicating her destination—screams, explosions, that sort of thing. But there was nothing.

He'd managed to fine-tune his temporal senses to the anomaly that perpetually followed her around, and he was currently following the faint ruptures in everyday life that occurred as a result; he couldn't sense the error itself—or, rather, herself—, but that could always be because of the Rift… right?

He followed the tiny abrasions in spacetime to a rather narrow alleyway, but no further. And then he began panicking. There was nothing there—no spatiotemporal rift (at least, not a new one), no teleports or time capsules or _anything _out of the ordinary. There was the faint tang of confusion, of something that should have not happened but was about to but couldn't anymore, but that wasn't exactly helpful.

He went back to the TARDIS. Hopefully he'd be able to trace her key, find her. If she had been teleported too far, even he wouldn't be able to sense her presence—but his ship would be able to detect the part of herself Rose carried with her no matter where she was.

_When _she was would be an entirely different problem, but he decided not to think about that just now. Jackie had already yelled at him once today; he wasn't about to give her a reason for another tirade.

The door creaked reassuringly when it opened, and he let himself relax, just a bit. He'd find her. He'd find her and he would save her from whatever danger she was in _now _and everything would be fine again.

The TARDIS whirred questioningly at him, his worry echoed in the hum of her machinery, but he just patted the console and started the scan.

There it was. He blinked, stared. Not too far away, either, strangely enough. He was startled and slightly suspicious of his luck.

Not one to question it, though, he quickly mapped out the route in his mind and darted out the door.

He ran into a mild setback when he spotted an angel statue on a nearby balcony.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was only left to a few seconds' contemplation of her plight (and how she was to get out of it) before she heard the telltale creak of a door opening. Her head jerked up and she stared, wide-eyed, at the woman who had just emerged from the hall.

For several moments, nothing happened. Then, both of them began speaking at once.

"Who are you?"

"Sorry, I just got… really, really lost… don't know where I am…" She trailed off for a bit before she realised she'd asked her a question. "I'm Rose."

The newcomer—presumably the owner of the place—raised an eyebrow at her, not unkindly. "Must have been one hell of a party," she quipped. "I'm Andrea."

"Hello," she returned, waving a little. "Look, really, sorry. I didn't mean…"

Andrea cut her off with a quick hand motion. "Hey, we've all had nights like that, right?"

Rose gave her a shaky smile. "S'pose."

"And since you don't look like a murderer…" She grinned. "Hung over?"

She considered. Well, there was one way of putting it, she supposed. Of course, the effects of non-TARDIS time travel wore off more quickly, but… still. It was an easier explanation, and went along with the rest of the story.

"A bit," she said.

Andrea made a lightly disbelieving noise. "I'm jealous," she said, stepping into the kitchen and starting to root around in the fridge. "I wouldn't even be talking if I were you."

Rose stood up again. "I, uh… Where am I?"

"Cardiff."

She nodded. "Good. Still in the same city."

Andrea gave her a dubious look. "You really were out of it, weren't you?"

She gave a noncommittal grin—and then her eyes focussed on something hanging on the opposite wall.

Her breath froze in her throat and it took a conscious effort to speak. "What's…" She swallowed. "What's that?"

The woman turned to follow her gaze. "Oh," she said. "Just something I sketched. It's been a theme recently. I liked that one, so… I hung it up." Her brow furrowed. "Why, does it matter?"

She was barely listening. Two words, seven letters scribbled across the bottom of a portrait of a snarling wolf—seemingly unimportant, and yet it felt that the entire universe was tipping.

_It was still following her. It wasn't over._

It wasn't over. What could possibly be _next?_

Rose hesitated, blinked, wavered.

"It's nothing," she murmured, and turned away.

-BAD WOLF-

I just realised that this has more actual past!content than the last past!_episode_. Oops. XD

Anyway… yeah. Here we are again. Whee!

Also: Lookie! I'm actually on time! :D :D :D HAIL THE MENTAL!SHELDON AND HIS EPIC NAGGERY.


	38. The Lone Angel, part III

Hey, look what Jonn Wolfe did! :D mediafire (dot) com (slash) download (dot) php ? 3n0e3tjbarh0eah BEHOLD THE SHINYFULNESS.

**Disclaimer:** You do realise I'm only putting these here out of habit, right?

SIAPNIAN: Hail the Mental!Sheldon! Also, I need a hug. Also also, I don't think I've ever actually _fangirlled _over a fellow ficcer before… Hey, alliteration!

**Non-Warning:** -smirk-

-BAD WOLF-

Rose left the flat as soon as she felt she could. Andrea was a lovely girl—really, she was—which was, oddly enough, part of the problem. Normal people didn't take random women appearing in their homes in the middle of the night in stride. And as for abnormal people… well, they usually weren't quite that helpful unless they were about to burst out of their humanoid disguise and eat her face off.

She wondered exactly when it was that such thoughts became the norm for her.

She wondered how she was going to get home. A brief look at a nearby newspaper (why mess with classics?) had informed her that she had been transported backwards very nearly forty years. Which quite effectively cut her off from the traditional wait-until-your-timelines-coincide plan; she didn't exactly relish the thought of only meeting up with him again when she was too old to keep up.

Her thoughts instinctively shied away from that concept and she quietly closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the wall. Travelling with (and, if she actually let herself think about it, being rather attached to) a semi-immortal alien had its downsides.

Unimportant. She was _Rose Tyler_. She'd nearly ripped the universe apart to get back to him once; she'd find a way to do it again. Preferably without hurting anything, but she knew very well that there would eventually come a time when she wouldn't care.

Her mind flickered back to the picture, the caption, and an indefinable emotion scrabbled at her lungs. She'd seen it a couple of times after it had no longer related to anything; she'd just assumed that she had put too many warnings there. She hadn't thought that the phrase was still useful.

She _certainly _hadn't thought she would see it again; Bad Wolf Bay had been its last appearance, if she remembered correctly. Of course, she had spent some time trying her hardest to forget that entire chunk of her life, so she might have simply… ignored it.

Rose groaned quietly, wishing that she had at least had the decency to leave herself more understandable messages. As it was, she knew that the sudden recurrence meant _something_, but… did it mean she still had a chance to get back to her current Doctor? Her previous Doctor? That she was supposed to stay around Andrea, or run the hell away, or…

She fought the increasing urge to bash her head against the wall.

She could figure it out later, she decided with a sudden violence. Now. What could she do? Assets, she thought, assets…

No TARDIS, no Doctor, not even a Vortex manipulator, and those weren't assets. Pull yourself together, Rose. It's not the end of the world. Yet.

Her sonic screwdriver was… yes, it was still in her pocket. Okay. That was a start. She also had a pen and some chocolate. And lint.

That was it. She was a bloody intergalactic time traveller and the only helpful thing she had on her was the screwdriver. Which, admittedly, would have been her best friend in pretty much any _other _situation; as it was, though, she'd kill for some psychic paper.

Maybe she could persuade the Doctor to get her some of that, too. She hadn't tried testing the full range of her eyelid-fluttering powers on this one yet; hadn't really had a reason to, barring simple curiosity.

She'd figure that out when she got back, she decided. As it was, though…

Thoughtfully, she reached up and pulled the TARDIS key out from under her shirt. It and the ship could detect each other; if there was a TARDIS, any TARDIS, any Doctor, in the vicinity…

…It and the ship could detect each other.

Rose stood up straight, stepping away from the wall and farther out into the parking lot. If she just put it somewhere where it wasn't likely to move for the next few decades, where she could frequently return without being eaten…

Her mind flickered back to an unusually-understanding woman, to the drawing on her wall.

Andrea opened the door and promptly smirked. "Hello, Rose."

She grinned weakly and wondered exactly when she had beaten the Doctor in sheer insanity.

-BAD WOLF-

_Hey, she's getting better at that. I would have thought that she'd completely ignore the message entirely, considering how my luck's been recently._

_I'm an amazingly powerful, hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional being with incredible spatiotemporal abilities. I shouldn't even have to think about luck. But these creatures are so stubborn… Andrea's nice, though. Very susceptible to my persuasion, which is always good. There need to be more people like her in the multiverse. It would make my life so much easier._

_I wonder how helpful I can make her be before she figures out something's up. It'll be interesting to find out, I think. And definitely more enjoyable than trying to twist my host and her current Time Lord into doing what should be obvious to them even without me throwing my name all over the place…_

_This is an improvement, at least. Rose has figured out that something is going on, at least, even if she doesn't quite know what it is yet. She'll find out eventually, though, I'm sure. She's a clever girl. I wouldn't even exist if she wasn't._

_Of course, the Doctor is (apparently) rather intelligent as well, and he's being completely useless. Not to mention his counterpart—err—original; he's still happily bouncing around and being entirely oblivious. And of course Donna isn't helping; she doesn't even know that she should —as far as she knows, Rose is gone permanently. She'd be incredibly helpful otherwise, of course, but with the Doctor being, well, himself, I'm not entirely sure how I could even begin to explain it to her. Not without adopting her as a host, anyhow, and I'm still saving that as one of my last resorts. She seems like the sort to fight back against that sort of thing, and I don't want to have to damage her. I like her._

_I also like her habit of not snogging my Doctor. It seems to be an increasingly rare companion trait as of late. Admittedly, the last couple of versions have been much more attractive to human eyes, but that doesn't excuse them…_

_I am not rambling!_

-BAD WOLF-

"Ah," the Doctor said succinctly, not taking his eyes off of the statue.

He thought for several moments. This was hardly normal Angel territory—far too much traffic, too many eyes wandering around, looking at things. He supposed the proximity to the Rift might be enough to overcome some of their trepidation, but… it was still a _city_. This was… This was not good. This was very much not good. This made the imminent gizka invasion look like…

…actually, the imminent gizka invasion never was very important. Torchwood could handle it; it was what they were there for. He'd just taken part because he was bored.

Not that he was going to tell Rose that, of course. She actually _liked _doing nothing of significance every now and again, despite all of his (and presumably his counterpart's as well) attempts to sway her.

Anyway.

Good news: it was a city. He didn't have to stand here and stare at the Angel himself for all eternity. Statues weren't exactly the most obviously alien-in-disguise things out there, but people did look at them all the same.

Bad news: it was a city. Angels didn't _go _in cities—at least, not the parts of them where even incredibly distracted Time Lords could spot them. Not unless…

…unless there was something really startlingly wonderful that was, or was about to be, there. Something they could sense before it even arrived, something… something with the kind of temporal backlash that would keep the creature fed for ages. Possibly literal ages.

Worse news: this might not be the only Angel around here.

He needed to go and find Rose _now_.

Deciding that there were enough people around to keep the creature safely locked in statue form until nightfall, he took off running.

-BAD WOLF-

A puzzled frown had overtaken Andrea's features roughly two seconds into Rose's explanation. It hadn't gone away since. She wasn't exactly surprised about that—this was the majority of the reason why she didn't actually tell people the truth about her life—but right at that moment, she couldn't really think of an easier way to get her point across. She'd learned a while ago that whoever actually tried to tell other people what happened to her and the Doctor on the daily basis… well. Sometimes, the human race's insistence on ignoring the obvious was quite helpful.

The woman blinked. "So… let me figure this out," she began. "You travel in time, but the guy who actually owns the machine ditched you—"

"Not on purpose," Rose clarified. "I got lost."

"—and you need to keep your key here so he can trace you… backwards… using that?"

She winced. "Basically, yeah."

Andrea stared at her for a few moments. "You're mad," she said. "Or drunk. Or both."

Rose chuckled—a high, breathless, slightly hysterical noise. "I'm really not. Uhh… hang on a sec."

She rooted around in her pocket, produced the sonic screwdriver, and started playing with the lights. And the stove. And the radio.

"Alright," she said. "Point taken."

-BAD WOLF-

This should be it—a fairly innocuous building full of fairly innocuous doors hiding fairly innocuous flats. Everything was very normal.

That worried him far more than it should have. Why in Rassilon's name would Rose be _here_? There was absolutely nothing that could possibly get her here—no aliens, no explosions, no family members (that he knew of, anyway). The only excuse that he could immediately think of was that she had been chasing the gizka, but considering her impatience with the matter, he wouldn't have thought she'd have bothered to pursue the thing all the way over here. Besides, she could run _very _quickly and had proven herself to be quite good at catching the things in the first place; it couldn't possibly have evaded her for this long, and since she didn't have any methods for containing multiple gizka…

Well, there was that explanation neatly disproved. Which left him with… well, with nothing, really.

He eyed the door suspiciously. Nothing, he thought, could possibly look that harmless. Not while actually living up to its appearance, that is.

His companion was behind that door. Probably getting eaten while he sat there, having a staredown with an inanimate object.

He knocked. Waited. Knocked again.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," came a slightly impatient voice. "I can't move as quickly as I used to, you know."

Human, female, mid-sixties. Or at least something that was pretending to be such. This could not possibly end well.

The door swung open. The owner of the voice blinked at him, looking almost entirely unsurprised by his presence.

"Oh," she said. "It's you."

He blinked at her. "I'm sorry?" Human, female, mid-sixties, and she had been _expecting _him? She was going to start cackling and revealing her fangs any minute now. There might even be scales. Possibly wings. Oh, and a spaceship preparing to blow up the planet.

"Rose told me you'd be showing up," she said conversationally, backing up and leaving the door open. He didn't exactly want to follow her inside, but if she had her…

"Rose?"

"Yes," she said, slightly annoyed. "Rose. You traced her key, right?" She started wandering from one side of the room to the other, evidently searching for something.

"Yes," he replied warily. "Where is she?"

"Oh, she's not here," the woman answered breezily. "Ah. Found it." She drew something out from under a small pile of clutter on the table. "Took it out a couple of days ago; she said you'd show up around today, and I didn't want to have to look for it when you did." She handed it to him.

He stared at the TARDIS key sitting innocently in his hands, and one of his hearts froze a little. "What's happened to her?" He already had at least one Angel to deal with; if she was in danger on top of that…

"Hell if I know," the woman grumbled. "Every time she tried to explain, I only understood five words in the lot. Something about time displacement and an angel statue."

He stared at her. "An angel statue," he repeated. "It got her?"

She shrugged. "Apparently. Here." She gave him a piece of paper with neat scribbles on it—a date and an address. "I offered to have you show up earlier, but you both said something about… I don't even know what."

He let himself relax. "Thank you," he said quietly.

"My pleasure," she replied. "Oh, and Rose says that if you don't get rid of the aliens before you go pick her up, she'll kill you herself."

He grinned. That woman knew him _far _too well.

-BAD WOLF-

"So how long do you think it'll take until he comes back?" Andrea asked.

Rose shook her head, observing her tea. "No idea," she said. "'S the thing about time travel; he'll show up whenever you'll have told him to."

She grimaced at the tense. "I'm just glad you're the one who has to worry about all that and not me," she said. "I can't wrap my head around it."

The blonde smirked at her a little. "Takes some getting used to, yeah," she agreed. "'S not that hard, though, once you figure it out."

Andrea made a sceptical noise.

"Anyway, could be weeks." Or months. Or years. A thought suddenly struck her. "I'm gonna need a place to stay," she realised. "Do you know—"

The woman stood up, grinning a little. "I'll go make up the sofa," she said.

Rose stared at her. "What, seriously?"

"Let me put it this way: you've got a magic wand thingie and I've got stuff that keeps breaking."

She blinked, smiled a bit. "Sonic screwdriver," she corrected. "Why are you being so nice to me?"

"You might not say that after you actually _see_ the couch." She sighed. "Look. I don't know much about time travel, but I'm pretty sure you can't just call your mother up twenty years before you were born. You don't have anywhere else to go and, frankly, I'm pretty sure I could take you in a fight."

Rose laughed outright then. Recalled the two-word message scrawled on the picture, relaxed a little; maybe nothing big or scary was happening this time, she thought. Maybe she was just… looking out for herself.

She hoped so.

-BAD WOLF-

_You idiot._

-BAD WOLF-

…Hi!

In other news, I forgot how much I love crack!fic.


	39. The Lone Angel, part IV

Wow, I fail. O.o I'm really sorry about that, guys. I was ambushed by schoolwork and being kidnapped on one Saturday and behind on my homework on the other. I'm not going to sleep until I finish this, though.

-later- Okay, I lied. Sorry. D;

**Disclaimer:** Blargh.

SIAPNIAN: _Why _did I mimic Jar-Jar Binks in previous A/Ns? I hate him. I hate him with BLINDING PASSION THAT IS FULL OF HATE. –sob- I am ashamed of you, past!me. ASHAMED.

**Non-Warning:** Do I even have to say it? Seriously now.

**Shameless self-promotion:** OctoberProject is starting up again and I'm in it. Yay for us!

-BAD WOLF-

_Day One._

Rose did this every time she and the Doctor (any Doctor) got separated. She wasn't even sure that it was conscious—every time he stepped out of sight, a little timer in her head started counting. It was something to do, she supposed. It wasn't as if there was anything else she even _could_ do; she was leaving her key with Andrea and now she just had to wait.

How long that particular stage would last, though, was a problem. Or could be. If it lasted beyond a couple of days, she'd have to start looking for another place to stay, and considering she shouldn't even have been born yet… that could be a problem. She could contact Torchwood, she supposed; if anyone would believe her and be helpful in such a situation, it would be them. Maybe she could even join up with them for a bit, just for something to do. And somewhere to be, of course. She was confident that Andrea had just been a temporary measure, a place to stay until she managed to get her bearings; much as she appreciated the gesture, it felt weird.

Rose buried her face in the pillow and tried to roll over. It didn't entirely work, and she only managed to suffocate herself in the cushions a little.

She missed him. Which was kind of silly, really; she'd only been gone for a few hours…

_Day Two._

She went to Torchwood. The first fifteen or so minutes of _that _ordeal were primarily spent in convincing them to stop pointing guns at her, which was fun. It took her quite a bit longer than she would have expected to get them to believe her. Even with the Bad Wolf's help, when it was easier to convince someone who (most likely—she'd have to ask about that) hadn't even accepted the existence of aliens before than an organisation formed for the purpose of extraterrestrial relations, something was probably very wrong. At last, though, she managed to get her point across, and the Institute grudgingly decided to be helpful.

Finally.

She'd keep the key with Andrea—Torchwood would probably use it to thwart an alien invasion or something and leave her stranded—but at least she could stop sleeping on her couch now. The woman had been right: it was an exceedingly uncomfortable piece of furniture.

The Doctor didn't appear and she resolutely didn't feel anything about that.

_Day Three._

She ate a sandwich and located a deck of cards, whereupon she spent an hour and a half repeatedly losing at solitaire. She visited Andrea at around 5.29 PM and saw no sign of passing Time Lords.

_Day Four._

She suddenly realised exactly how dull her life was getting. In a sudden bout of panic, she followed Torchwood to an alien crash site, where she proceeded to save the world in sixty-three seconds flat.

If the Doctor didn't find her soon, she was going to go completely insane.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor, valiantly trying to be unaware of his companion's certain distress and failing, sat on the sidewalk and stared at the Angel. Well, perhaps "glared" was a better term; he certainly wasn't terribly happy with the thing and would take immense pleasure in making sure it didn't touch anyone else.

…as soon as he figured out how to do that. _Why_ did they have to be so hard to get rid of? Well, he knew why. Being easy to destroy wasn't exactly the kind of trait that ensured one's survival. Just this once, though, why couldn't it be simple? Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, bam, problem solved.

Of course not.

He growled at the statue. The statue didn't react very much. Or at all.

Annoyed, he got to his feet, yanking his fingers through his hair. It would go after him next, he knew, although he still wasn't entirely sure if that was a good thing or not. Given enough time, he could probably find a way to twist it to his advantage, but that would require having a plan of some kind.

He spun around, as if seeing the opposite wall would allow him to suddenly figure out the problem.

His eyes landed on the Angel again and he flinched despite himself. In the split second he hadn't been looking at it, it had shifted. Its face was uncovered, its arms hanging limply by its sides, and its seemingly-lifeless gaze was riveted on him. With so many people around, it couldn't do much more than that without attracting notice; but it didn't need to do much to get its point across.

"Right," he said.

Whatever he ended up doing, he needed to do it very, very soon. If he left the Angel alone after dark, someone else would fall victim to its hunger, and he wouldn't be able to trace that. Not here; the natural chaos of the Rift meant that the little fluctuations indicative of the creature's feeding were practically inaudible by comparison. And, frankly, he was already feeling guilty enough for Rose's disappearance, even though he couldn't have known what was going on.

The Doctor sighed, already tired of the puzzle. There was a distinct difference between saving the world from his average monster of the week and saving himself and his companion from a Weeping Angel. The only way to kill an Angel (that he knew of, and he knew pretty much everything when it came to defeating various alien antagonists) was to keep it from eating for a few millennia—which was, unfortunately, much more easily said than done. Normally, he'd trick the thing into the TARDIS and just drop it off on an abandoned planet, but… he couldn't let it anywhere near the interior of his ship. He didn't even want to think about all the things that would go wrong if the thing got inside.

He shuddered a little.

For a half-second, he almost wished there was more than one Angel around; he could do what he had last time and trick them into looking at each other. At least then he would have some more time to figure out a more permanent solution. But if there was another one around somewhere, it wasn't showing up, and Angels had a tendency to travel in groups if it was at all possible. It made it harder to look at all of them at once.

All the same, that option wasn't exactly viable (as far as he could tell), Torchwood's solution would probably involve an explosion of some kind, which would just make the problem worse somehow, and Rose was still trapped forty years in the past.

He desperately wished she'd let him pick her up first, although he supposed that it was partially to ensure that she wouldn't just end up getting caught again. She was clever and rarely made the same mistake twice, but even she was susceptible to the need to lubricate her eyeballs on a regular basis. It made sense not to go back for her first.

It didn't mean he didn't miss her, though.

-BAD WOLF-

_Yes, yes, you're pitiful and depressed and mopey. We get it. Now get on with the whole saving-the-world thing, please. Or, well… not quite the world, admittedly. Just a few people. Technically._

_Anyway._

_I'm kind of disappointed in Rose right now, honestly. Yes, I suppose she got the minor point of putting my signature there, but she's completely missing the bigger one and I'm not even sure what to do about it. I would have expected more out of her, honestly. I suppose I can always just nag her a little more, but… I thought she'd at least consider the possibility._

_Well. She's human. They're almost as good at deceiving themselves as Time Lords are. I'm quite interested to hear Altie's explanation of his behaviour, actually. Besides how he was planning on doing it all along and just kept putting it off._

_I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to use that as an excuse. If Rose accepted it, though, I'd seriously think of disowning her._

_What with all the other spontaneous bouts of stupidity these people have exhibited, though, I wouldn't be surprised if she did._

_Rassilon, I hate this._

-BAD WOLF-

_Day 12._

Rose was starting to go insane. She knew what that felt like, actually; she'd been officially classified as mentally-unstable at least three times since she'd met the Doctor. She knew what losing her mind felt like. This was definitely it.

It wasn't quite worse than what had happened when she'd first found herself trapped in that universe. Depression wasn't particularly involved this time, after all. Frustration, on the other hand, most definitely was.

She had never been good at waiting.

_Day 13._

She checked the TARDIS key every day for any telltale signs of warmth. Just because leaving the thing alone for four decades was _a _way to get back to her natural time period (which now seemed to be all of them, as long as a certain blue box was close at hand) didn't mean it was the only way. Either she had absolutely atrocious timing, though, or the Doctor had something against that particular year, because its temperature only seemed to go down with time.

_Day 14._

Andrea turned out to be helpful in more ways than one. It wasn't like she hadn't had any friends since she hopped universes—nothing so melodramatic as that; just because she'd lost her first Doctor didn't mean that she was going to shun human contact for the rest of her life—but… well, to be honest, she'd never actually developed any of those relationships very far. Mostly, she hadn't had the time; she hadn't been in Pete's World very long, comparatively, before this universe's Doctor had run into her. And then, well…

She found that she'd missed non-familial female companionship. Half the time, it kept her from bashing her head against something and being done with the whole functioning-brain thing.

She'd have to figure out a way to keep in contact after she got back home.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor had been over practically every scrap of knowledge he possessed regarding the Angels, and had come up with but one conclusion: he needed something to stare at it for several thousand years.

He didn't have several thousand years, nor did he have something that could observe it for that long.

He had a TARDIS that shouldn't be flown for another couple of hours. He had a creature that could absolutely not be let near it at any costs. He had a date and address for locating his lost companion, but she'd forbidden him to use that.

At this point, he really wished she hadn't. He could use some blinding insight right now, and humans were good for that sort of thing. It was why he kept them around (well, that and the fact that he really did care for the odd little bipeds); whereas the very complexity that made his brain so fundamentally amazing also tended to cause him to miss the obvious, humans were the exact opposite. They could barely grasp the concept of time travel even at the height of their technological prowess, but give them a situation like… well, like this, and they would just breeze through it. Wonderful creatures.

He desperately wished the Angel had decided to show up at a time when aliens were an accepted occurrence. Cardiff got considerably more activity than most places, but apparently that didn't help much. Thus, as tempting as it was to try, just walking up to a random person and asking them what they thought would probably be a bad idea.

A brief notion of asking Torchwood for help wandered through his mind, but he discarded it fairly quickly. Just because half the Institute idolised him didn't mean that he trusted them very much.

He was on his own, then.

The Doctor scowled at the Angel. The Angel calmly stared back, still locked in its unnerving observance.

Angels couldn't be killed by anything he could easily control. Except Time.

He had a timeship. She couldn't fly right now, but she could…

The Rift.

He froze, just a little. If he could trick the Angel close to the rift, use the TARDIS as bait, he might be able to… alter things. Shift the centre of the spatiotemporal fracture, speed Time up a few billion years per second…

It would be a little tricky, altering the natural flow of Time in such a small area without affecting external events, but his TARDIS was brilliant and the Rift was surprisingly stable for its nature. It was possible. It was… It was _very _possible. The only problem was getting the Angel to follow him without suspicion.

He thought for a few minutes and then, suddenly, grinned.

-BAD WOLF-

_Day 20._

When she stopped by Andrea's flat to visit her and check on the key, it was warm. Rose blinked hard, breath shuddering in her throat for the few seconds it took her to confirm her suspicion. She explained what was going on to Andrea in a few choppy half-sentences and then took off running, using the fluctuations in the temperature of the bit of metal.

It was just starting to burn her hand when she heard the distinctive noise of the TARDIS taking off. Within seconds, the key was cold again.

She was so killing him when she got back, she thought fiercely.

_Day 21_.

She _was _going to get back.

_Day 22._

…right?

-BAD WOLF-

And that is that. Again, I'm so sorry it took so long. I am a horrible person and have been chastising myself for the past… well, the past two weeks, to be honest.

Oh! And I forgot! THERE ARE OVER 500 REVIEWS FOR THIS THING RIGHT NOW. WTF. :D I love you people. (The Disturbed Poet, BTW, was the 500th reviewer-person. Sneaky woman.)

Speaking of her, she's crossed over The Big Bang Theory with That Guy With The Glasses (specifically, the Nostalgia Critic). And it's actually working. What the frell, Tiberius. What the _frell._

Speaking of TBBT, I can now cosplay as Sheldon. Fear me! :D

Speaking of fear… no, I really don't have anything else to say. I'm totally not trying to up the wordcount. What makes you think that? Silly people. ^_^

Be well!


	40. The Lone Angel, part V

I am getting so very, very sick of being late. –annoyance- Anyway. I am sorry. Really. I don't remember the details of what happened for the first two weeks, but I remember that in week 3 I was incredibly close to finishing… and then my hard drive died. Seriously. Died. It had to be replaced (although the fact that this one has a terabyte is a marked improvement and almost makes it all worth it), so I was left without a computer for a week and I lost all my data. So Yeah…

**Disclaimer: **-headdesk-

SIAPNIAN: Well, one of my uncles is in rather bad shape at the moment… and… I don't have anything else to say, really. (Sorry. Off day.)

**Non-Warning:** You know very well who betaed this. :P

-BAD WOLF-

_Day 26._

Rose had mostly calmed down. The days immediately following her painfully short-lived alternate escape route had caused her to spiral into a bit of a panic (where the hell _was _he?), but eventually it had passed, fading into a kind of annoyed acceptance.

Christmas was coming. She tried to forget about that whenever possible, but it continuously forced itself in on her mind, and with that knowledge came Assumptions. Rose was very bad at not making Assumptions. Just because he had a knack for showing up on Christmas didn't mean that he _would_, she told herself. Considering how bad her luck had been recently, it might even mean that he wouldn't. She'd get back home. She just had to be patient.

And stop making Assumptions. In fact, it would probably be better to just negate that theory entirely. The Doctor was absolutely not going to show up on Christmas. That was patently ridiculous. There was no way that was happening.

But he always—

No. Not this time.

_Day 27._

The attempt to derail Rose's Christmas theory failed miserably. So did her attempt to ignore the holiday's existence altogether. Instead, she decided to just ignore the existence of the theory, and that seemed to be working. Sort of.

Not really. But she was ignoring that.

Instead, she focussed on the fact that there was something that looked a little bit like a rabid alpaca crossed with the Mad Hatter that was patiently trying to eat one of the desks.

_Day 28._

The owners of the Hatter-alpaca finally decided to show up. They were immensely grateful for Torchwood's assistance in keeping their pet (or maybe their cousin—the translation always got a little wonky whenever Rose was out of reach of the TARDIS) out of trouble, and showed it by giving her a shiny bit of… umm… well, she didn't know what it was. It was mildly telepathic—or, rather, initiated mild telepathy in its user—though, so she decided she'd give it to Andrea. The poor girl was absolutely rubbish at reading people.

Well. People who weren't Rose. And if it weren't for the Bad Wolf, Rose would be rather unnerved by that.

-BAD WOLF-

_I'm so glad I don't have to try and be undercover anymore. It was so tedious when I was doing that. Not that this is much better, of course, considering that my host and her assorted Time Lords seem to have become completely blind to little things like having the Universe fracture… Why is that, anyway? It doesn't make sense. I'd say that other things were at work here, but there are no other things that could—much less would want to—sabotage me._

_I don't know. I'm probably just overreacting. You would too, if people who had previously proven themselves to be temporally observant to an almost absurd degree suddenly decided to miss the obvious like this._

_Still, it… it just doesn't make sense. It should make sense, but it doesn't, and… I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it._

_I so hope it's just some kind of undetectable brain damage. Like emotion. Or brain damage._

-BAD WOLF-

The Angel watched as the Time Lord ran with a haste that did not so much make him clumsy as it did the people around him. Concern flitted through its mind and it desperately strained against the compulsion that made it motionless, but to no avail. Someone was still observing it, but… he wouldn't be moving that quickly unless he had thought of something. The Angel fully admitted that the "something" might actually involve it following him, but it couldn't just sit there and not know. Besides, if he just caught up to him, the point would be thoroughly moot. If it could just…

There! Whoever had been looking at him moved on. Without even the faintest pause, the Angel burst into movement too quick for eyes to follow (even though seeing it would have been impossible anyway), tracking the Time Lord's progress. It saw him dig a cell phone out of his pocket and begin talking into it, but the noise of the surrounding people efficiently destroyed any ability to eavesdrop.

Then, suddenly, someone looked at it. It froze, mentally screaming in fury, and helplessly watched the Time Lord turn a corner and vanish. It suddenly wondered if the call hadn't been simply to tell someone to watch it for a couple of hours, and it seethed at the thought. It was one of the Weeping Angels. It was the hunter, not the prey. It shouldn't be sitting here, powerless, watching its target simply walk away without the slightest bit of effort.

It managed to take some comfort in the idea that this couldn't possibly be the plan. No mortal would be able to live long enough (let alone not blink for long enough) to simply wait for it to starve to death, and even the Doctor would have a hard time convincing someone to condemn their family to alternating shifts of staring at a statue for generations. It knew something of Torchwood, as most aliens on Earth did; the organisation might have a somewhat disturbing obsession with the man, but even he couldn't have that much influence over them—and no one else would even understand the purpose of the exercise.

No. This wasn't the plan. This was a delay; it would pass.

The Angel forced itself to be patient.

-BAD WOLF-

_Day ?._

Nothing extraordinary happened.

_Day ?._

Rose suddenly realised that her mental clock had stopped marking off the days of her absence from the TARDIS. In a sudden panic (she couldn't forget, she just _couldn't, _he was coming back he was coming back he was coming back and she couldn't forget that, couldn't forget him) she burst out of her room and tore through Torchwood until she found a calendar.

_Day 39._

Thoroughly sick of the whole situation, Rose stayed at Andrea's all day, holding the key in the hope that it might start doing something interesting.

"Glow," she told it fiercely. "Heat up. Do _something._"

It didn't reply.

Rose sighed and sat back in her chair. After a moment in which nothing in particular happened (barring Andrea continuing to shuffle absentmindedly in the kitchen), her eyes met those of the wolf drawing on the wall. It stared back, but refused to give any kind of enlightenment.

It wouldn't be so bad, she thought wistfully, if things weren't so _boring_ now. Yeah, she thwarted the odd alien invasion, but that wasn't very often. She'd gotten used to a non-linear view of time, and being trapped in one year was… somehow infuriating.

She wondered suddenly how Sarah-Jane had managed it, but found that train of thought disheartening.

-BAD WOLF-

The Angel didn't know how long it took for Torchwood to stop staring at it. It only acknowledged that it was free and took off as quickly as it could.

Dimly, it recognised that this was probably a bad idea, but what other option did it have? The Doctor would hunt it as long as it was on this world, and without any decent version of space travel… Well, there was really nowhere else to go.

It really shouldn't have come here.

Thankfully, the Angel was only stopped twice, and never for more than a couple of seconds. It didn't even think about it anymore; it just waited until the person stopped watching and continued on its way. In short order, it was approaching the Doctor's ship. If he wasn't here…

The Angel approached carefully. Seeing no one, it darted quickly around the TARDIS. Nothing was out of place, nothing was suspicious; there was absolutely nothing to indicate the slightest trap.

Somehow, that was more terrifying than anything else could have been.

This wasn't worth it. The Angel turned to go; the Doctor might be able to trace it more readily outside of the background noise of the Rift, but it was better than staying here and waiting for him to come up with a way to kill it. Wait a few centuries until interstellar travel was perfected, sneak onto one of the ships, vanish into the nigh-infinity of the universe. The Time Lord wouldn't take the trouble to find it then.

There was a creak behind and the Angel involuntarily stopped, suddenly trapped in statue form. Yes, trapped; its defences had always felt protective, safe, but today… today. Today was different, and it would have given anything to be a normal creature, just so it could _run._

"Hello," the Doctor said quietly. "Now. I am really sorry about this."

The Angel, naturally, did nothing.

"There just aren't very many ways to stop you from eating people, and… well… manipulating the Rift seemed to be the quickest way to go about it. Well, quickest for me, anyway… did I mention that I'm sorry? Because, frankly, this is going to hurt."

It needed to run. What was the use of a defence mechanism if it spelled one's downfall?

"Still. Can't let you run around, either, and I'm certainly not letting you anywhere near my ship. So…" He trailed off. "Sorry," he said, as if that helped things.

The Angel steeled itself. A faint buzz sounded from behind, and Time stopped.

No, the creature thought, several decades later; that speck of dust dangling in midair was in a different spot. The world was still operating. The Angel just wasn't a part of it anymore.

It started to be seriously bothered by the lack of sustenance in perhaps the second century of its imprisonment. The discomfort of that was slowly joined by other pains: hairline fractures, born simply of age, began to work their way across its skin, leaving lines of fire in their wake. Part of its eyelid flaked off. The dust continued its achingly slow path, and the alien's first thousand years of distorted time passed without further incident.

One of the cracks reached just a little too far, and its left wing fell off and crashed to the ground. The Angel stared blankly ahead, mind already beginning to fracture, and wondered how long this was going to take.

Silence. The other wing fell. A thousand years took one of its arms; another four hundred stole the other. It lost its shape, face dissolving into nothingness, eyesight lost in a slow decay.

Silence. Its mind broke. More cracks, zigzagging across its neck, left it unbalanced; it collapsed, crumbling just below the jaw. Its head bounced a couple of times before it lay still.

Silence. Two seconds after the start of its imprisonment, the Angel finally died.

-BAD WOLF-

_Day 40._

It was Christmas Eve. Rose managed not to consciously think about her Assumption, but it was always there in the back of her mind. If she was right, she would finally be able to go home. She hadn't spent this long in one time—let alone one place—since she'd first been dropped into this universe.

But she couldn't think about that, so she didn't.

_Day 41._

He didn't come. He didn't come and it didn't ruin her day and she wasn't sure how she felt about that. It had never been a guarantee, after all, and… well… it was Christmas. It was very, very hard to ruin that. Nigh impossible, even.

Besides, she'd kind of gotten used to waiting. It terrified her a little bit to admit that, but it was still true.

_Day 42._

Rose visited Andrea more out of friendship and habit now than expectation. She had actually considered not going at all—she'd seen her the day before, after all—but ended up going anyway. Admittedly, it was partially to make sure that she was conscious, but still, she went.

It was taking her longer than usual to answer the door. She frowned at it, loath to simply walk in but still slightly concerned; she had just resolved to try knocking again when the door opened of its own accord.

"Someone's here to see you," Andrea said by way of greeting.

She didn't, wouldn't, couldn't let herself believe it—but an achingly familiar figure stepped into view behind her friend, and her breath crystallised in her throat.

"H'lo," she said.

"Hello," the Doctor replied gravely.

She swallowed. "'m not dreaming again, am I?"

He observed her in silence for a moment before his expression suddenly burst into a smile. "No."

Rose had no memory of moving. One moment she was gaping like an idiot at the suddenly-returned Time Lord, the next she was nearly tackling him, giggling breathlessly into his shoulder as he rocked back on his heels to avoid falling. He returned the embrace with a careful kind of tightness, and she could sense him grinning even if she couldn't see it.

"Took you long enough," she scolded him joyously, pressing her fingers into his shoulder-blades. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Andrea smirking, a look of serene amusement on her face. She nodded towards the Doctor and raised an eyebrow at Rose, who patiently ignored her friend's evident approval.

The Time Lord, blissfully unaware of the mute exchange, attempted to disentangle himself and failed. Instead, he simply rotated them until he was facing Andrea.

"Write today down," he told her. "I will have run into you a few decades from now—"

"Stop it with the tenses," Andrea interrupted. "_Please._"

"—and I need to know when this happened."

She nodded complacently.

Rose finally let go of the Doctor and stepped back a bit, turning towards Andrea.

"Thank you," she said. "Seriously."

Andrea waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. "Don't worry about it. I do the same for every misplaced time traveller who happens to spontaneously appear in my kitchen."

Rose, unable to resist greeting the TARDIS for much longer, grinned and went to look for her. The two others in the room followed her, the Doctor's gait slightly slower than usual as he observed her progress towards the machine.

The flat was distressingly small, and the timeship was thus not particularly difficult to find. Rose reached out, running her fingers lightly over the door before instinctively reaching for a key that wasn't there.

She spun around and the Doctor wordlessly proffered the object. It looked a bit more battered and the chain looked like it had started to rust a little bit, but it was there, and it was hers.

Rose held her hands out and the Doctor dropped the key into her grasp. Quickly, she turned and unlocked the door, relishing the faint familiar creak it made as she pushed it open.

The lights brightened at her entrance and the hum from the console increased in pitch for a millisecond, and Rose closed her eyes and patted the doorframe in response.

The clock in her head quietly switched itself off.

-BAD WOLF-

I hate getting out-of-practice with this stuff. It takes so long to get back into it. Rawrgh.

Parenthetically, it was brought to my attention (both by one of you and my own thoughts on the subject, in my defence) that the Bad Wolf was getting a bit repetitive. I'm playing with her now and trying to figure out how the frak I'm going to last the rest of the series without removing her for Extended Periods of Doom. Let me know how that turned out, yeah?

Again, I'm sorry about all of this. I do have a valid excuse for the last bit, but the rest… blargh. I'm sorry. :(

And in other news, there is no other news. Be well, everyone.


	41. Hide & Seek, part I

I AM NOT APOLOGISING. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA. HAHA. HA. …ha.

**Disclaimer:** I'm probably just going to stop saying this. It's kind of getting on my nerves. XD

SIAPNIAN: SIAPNIAN stands for "Somewhat Irritating And Probably Not Important Author's Note". Just so as you all know. :) And OH MY GOSH, THIS EPISODE HAS A TITLE WITH MORE THAN ONE WORD IN IT. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? …-cough- Sorry. Might be in a slightly hyper mood at the moment.

**Non-Warning: **…yeah.

**Rather Depressing Side-Note:** My Nunky Rick died two days ago. I didn't know him very well—or at all, really—but… still. Sadness.

-BAD WOLF-

Heart pounding in a slightly off-kilter rhythm, Rose ran through the twisting corridors of the TARDIS. She had learned a tolerable amount of stealth during her travels with the Doctor, but much of the ship's halls (if not the rooms) were floored by the same grating that covered the console room, and _that _certainly didn't allow silent travel. At least, not at speed. The good news: She could hear her pursuers coming. The bad news: They could hear her going. The _really _bad news: Fear had a nasty habit of clouding her senses if she didn't expect it. And she certainly hadn't expected this.

It was supposed to be a normal trip, Rose quietly lamented. Well, as if there _was _such a thing when it came to the Doctor, but… At the very least, she had expected that there would be a bit more warning. She had expected that the Time Lord would at least be able to explain something before being knocked out and dragged off.

She had expected that their attackers would remain safely outside the TARDIS until she figured out what to do about them.

The Doctor had purposefully kept her inside, going out to face them alone. Whatever he needed, Rose had to be absolutely unseen. And wasn't she just doing a wonderful job of that?

Actually, she might be. She couldn't tell. Forcing herself to stop running, trying to breathe as quietly as possible, Rose listened.

Silence. They—whoever they were—may not even have passed beyond the console room yet. She silently berated herself; blind panic would be absolutely no help, to her or the Doctor. Especially to the Doctor. By now, he was unconscious or worse, and what was she doing? Running away because they were in the TARDIS and she was scared.

Rose glared at an unsuspecting wall as if it were to blame and darted into a side room. Admittedly, she had no idea what these creatures were or what they were doing, but she couldn't let them have the ship or the Doctor. They didn't look particularly imposing, anyhow, and… well, frankly, Rose would feel a lot safer if she at least had something to hit the things with, no matter how ineffectively. Besides, she had a living spaceship on her side.

Whatever horrible thing they had decided to do with the Doctor, it was going to stop.

-BAD WOLF-

Okay. The trouble with this is the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing anymore. I lost all of my plans in the crash, so… bear with me, yeah?

Parenthetically, I just read the entire FetishFuel/NostalgiaCritic page. …-faints-


	42. Hide & Seek, part II

Aaaand. I'm apologising. . Rassilon, I'm getting sick of having to do this. THE EXPLANATION: The issue with Wolfie nagged at me. A lot. And, well, not _very _many of you know me, but some of you do, and those of you who do should know that when something is nagging at me I can't just let it go and move on with… whatever. I had to think of a way to either fix it or incorporate it in such a way as it looked like I meant to do it. I absolutely could not continue until I figured out a way to negate the error. And, as I don't want to go back through half the fic and edit all of Wolfie's monologues, I had to resort to incorporating it in such a way that it Makes Sense with the rest of the… whatnot. And thank God, it does actually work if I alter a couple of things in the finale. So… angst over now. Yaaay! Bear with me; this is the longest thing I have ever written and I'm honestly not used to building tension over however many tens of thousands of words this ends up being. …wow, that was long. Sorry about that.

**Disclaimer: **-headdeskheaddeskheaddesk- …Hey, my spellcheck accepts that as a word now. Wait, no, it doesn't. Never mind.

SIAPNIAN: I'M GOING TO SAY HAPPY CHRISTMAS BECAUSE IT ALWAYS BUGGED ME THAT EVERYTHING ELSE IS HAPPY BUT CHRISTMAS IS MERRY SO ANYWAY HAPPY CHRISTMAS. :D :D :D

**Non-Warning:** Betaed, unsurprisingly, by TheDisturbedPoet.

-BAD WOLF-

A disgruntled alien head poked itself into a complacent alien room, quickly followed by a disgruntled alien body.

"I heard there's been a delay," the owner of the body said.

Another alien, this one slightly bluish with anxiety, shuffled its multiple feet and stuttered a reply. "Forgive me," it—she? It was difficult to tell—said. "He is resisting integration—"

"Why?" demanded the first creature.

More stuttering. "We were wrong," it said, voice quietly nervous. "He wasn't alone."

A rapid string of exceedingly rude words flowed through the air. Thankfully, they were in a language only one species understood. "That would be a problem for the guards, not the scientists," snapped the disgruntled one—possibly male, but there was the lack of recognisable distinguishing marks again. "Why is it affecting you?"

"Well…" She hesitated. "He won't stay in for more than a few minutes. We've tried to suppress his memory of her, keep him from realising something's amiss, but…" Another pause. "His brain is too advanced, and whoever his companion is… He can't let her go." She took in a quick breath, expression becoming earnest. "It's our _only _problem, I swear. We just need more time."

"Need I remind you that time is the one resource we lack? Every minute, more of us die because _you _can't find a way to get your own machine to work!"

The smaller alien ducked her head. "I understand. I'll integrate him as soon as I can, I promise."

"You'd better," growled the other. "In the meantime, we need to go and find our stowaway."

-BAD WOLF-

Darkness. Always darkness. Why was it always darkness? Just once, couldn't there be some kind of happy, pleasant place to wait until he regained consciousness? The Doctor had never been particularly fond of shadows in any form. Being attacked by them generally ruined the entire concept.

Come to think of it, why _was _he unconscious, and when could he stop it? The Time Lord tested the edges of his awareness and found that he was perilously close to lucidity. Well, then.

He opened his eyes and instantly shut them again. Come to think of it, darkness was good. He liked it.

Groaning, he rolled over and started to take stock of his situation. Raging headache, severe sensitivity to light, bruises on his right side. He thought for a moment and found that the pounding in his skull was more intense on that side, as well.

_Ow,_ he thought.

Had he crashed? He was definitely still inside the TARDIS, whatever else was going on. Carefully, the Doctor cracked his eyes open and found that it was considerably less painful now. Either the ship had dimmed the lights for him or he was getting better already. He didn't much care at that point.

Making sure not to aggravate any of his varied injuries, the Doctor stood up. He listed a little to the left, but that would soon pass, he knew. He'd had so many head wounds that they were almost boring now. The important thing was the TARDIS. Was she all right?

A brief examination said that she was. This almost disturbed him more than the opposite answer would have. What kind of crash could have thrown him to the ground that violently, but kept his ship fully intact? For that matter, where _was _he? The last thing he remembered, they'd just left—

_They._

The Doctor froze. They. He wasn't alone. He wasn't supposed to be alone. He remembered… he remembered…

—_yellow_—

Nothing.

Ohh, this was bad. This was very, very bad. There was someone else. He _knew _there was someone else. Why couldn't he remember?

_Think, think, think, think, think, think, think…_ Racnoss. Sun-consuming clouds. Jane Austen. Living water. Reapers. Antarctica. Weeping Angels.

He'd defeated all of them on his own. There was no one else. He had hit his head, he was delusional, he was—

_No._ She'd helped him, she'd saved him, she'd been there through all of it, he knew it, he _remembered_. Which meant…

This wasn't real. He needed to remember, needed to find a way to—

_Error: Integration failed. Reset in 3…_

—escape, needed to find—

_2…_

—her. He remembered her, he _remembered_ and—

_1…_

—Rose, her name was Rose, and how could he ever forget his—

_Resetting._

Darkness. Always darkness. Why was it always darkness?

-BAD WOLF-

Rose slunk through the TARDIS halls, quietly resenting the Doctor's intense dislike of weapons. Okay, so she wasn't too fond of killing things either, but she would have at least liked something more effective than a curtain-rod to protect herself. Although, to be fair, it was a very large and impressive curtain-rod.

Directions blurred through her thoughts—_third left, fourth right, straight ahead, past the library, first right_—but the way to the Doctor's sword collection wasn't helpful when A. her hunters were probably armed with guns and B. they were in the way anyhow.

They were _in _her _TARDIS._ Err, the Doctor's TARDIS. The TARDIS.

Rose shook herself. That wasn't helping. She needed to figure out what these things were and how to get them out of _the _TARDIS, and then she needed to go and rescue the Doctor from whatever hellish fate he'd located this time.

Footsteps.

Almost before she could think, Rose darted into one of the hallways, pressing herself against the wall and trying not to breathe. The timeship had darkened every light she had to help her, so she managed to hide behind a column without being spotted. Peeking out, she saw pinkish skin and smooth scales of an indeterminable colour. Whatever the things were, she didn't recognise them.

Well, that complicated things. Rose, not able to do anything more audible, rolled her eyes as loudly as she could.

A voice. "We're never going to find it in here."

It?

A second voice. _"I thought Time Lords were more logical than this. This place is a maze. How does he not get lost?"_

"How does _it _not get lost?"

Wait, were they talking about her? Rose bristled a little.

_"I don't know. I'm inclined to agree with you, though. If it doesn't want to be found, it won't be. The ship is sentient, remember. And it's on its side."_

They were, weren't they? Ohh, if she could talk without being located…

An exasperated noise. "Why are we still looking? This place…"

_"We'll keep looking until we're told to stop," _the other voice said firmly. _"Or until we find it."_

Rose was seriously considering whacking the thing nearest to her on the head. They referred to the Doctor by the correct gender, she thought bitterly, so it wasn't like they had the wrong concept or anything…

Whatever. Again, not the point. She needed to—

The hum permeating the ship suddenly increased in volume. The TARDIS began impressing concepts in Rose's mind: everything would be fine, she could take care of herself, but Rose needed to go out and find the Doctor before he got himself killed. Again.

The human grinned up at the ceiling, lightly patting the wall. Mouthing a quick "thank you", knowing that the ship would see it, she darted out of her hiding spot.

-BAD WOLF-

_Ahh, Rose. Off to rescue the Time Lord again. You know, I think sometimes that he gets caught on purpose just so she can rescue him. It was endearing on the other one. With this one, it's just annoying. I mean, can't he tell—_

_…what? I… Repetitive? I'm not being repetitive. You're being stupid and human. I haven't…_

_…no, really… I'm not… I…_

_No. I don't forget things. You people do. I do not. I am the personification of the Time Vortex and the TARDIS and Rose, all at the same time, and I do not forget, so I can't have forgotten I've already said something. You're wrong and that's it._

_…Why are you looking at me like that? Well, yes, the Vortex is coming apart, but that's because Altie is too stupid to let Rose go! …or even notice that he should! …or… anything! I've remained sane through worse. Come on._

_No, I most certainly am not losing my mind! Impertinent, insignificant little mortals. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother telling you anything._

-BAD WOLF-

"Error: Integration failed."

The singular conscious occupant of the room muttered something incredibly rude and smacked one of her hands viciously against the wall.

Six. Six times, they'd tried this. Advanced biology or no, no one's mind could survive too much more. To be constantly plunged into an artificially-generated reality, only to be pulled back out again, memories suppressed, thoughts edited out entirely…

The Doctor was their only hope. They had tried every other resource they had. If he failed…

"Think, Yssa," she snapped to herself. "Think."

It would be so much easier just to ask him, she thought bitterly. It wasn't an option, she knew, but it would be _so much easier._ It would save time, and by extension, lives.

For a half-second, she considered doing it. Breaking the vow. Waking him up. The Doctor was inherently good—violent and unpredictable he might be, sometimes shading into outright destructiveness, but he was _good_. Everyone in the galaxy knew that. Everyone in the _universe _knew that. He would help, if she asked—

But she couldn't. If Yssa asked, none of the rest of her world would accept his help. It was a stupid system, she thought, but hadn't it worked? Hadn't they avoided so much chaos through isolation?

No. It wasn't an option. But the Doctor simply would not accept a world without his companion in it, and unless he accepted the fiction they gave him—

Yssa paused, thought. She had gotten a look inside his mind every time they had started the simulation. Admittedly, she knew little of the companion he sought, but perhaps… perhaps enough.

She regarded the Time Lord, lying with eerie stillness on the machine. More timidly, she regarded the apparatus's twin.

She needed more time. She needed another chance. She couldn't just jump in unprepared; he would notice, he would know…

…but perhaps not quickly enough.

If she failed (again, came a tiny voice in her head), she would only have damaged him more, but there was no other way.

Yssa closed her eyes, steeled herself, and stepped over to the other machine.

-BAD WOLF-

Darkness. Always darkness. Just—

"Doctor?"

The Doctor tensed. _Rose._ She sounded scared. What was wrong? What had happened? He needed to wake up, needed to… where were his eyeballs? Oh, yes.

Tentatively, he opened his eyes. _"Ow."_

"Doctor?" Rose asked again. He looked towards the source of the voice and saw her standing nervously next to the console. "Are you all right?"

"Fine," he lied. "I'm fine. You?" That was the important thing. He was a Time Lord; he could get over silly little things like head injuries. Rose, though…

"Yeah."

Oh, well, then. Cautiously, the Doctor sat up. "What happened?" It disturbed him immensely not to know, as it always did—thousands of thoughts churning through his pounding head as he tried to make sense of things. Did they crash? Where were they going, anyway? Why didn't he know? Did he put the TARDIS on random again? No, Rose didn't like that. Except when she did. How had he ended up unconscious? How had Rose ended up uninjured? Where were they? Was the TARDIS okay?

"We… we crashed," she said uncertainly. (Wouldn't she know?) "I'm not sure why. You hit your head on the console and I didn't know what to do, so…"

There really wasn't much he could say to that. He tried anyway. "Right," he managed. "Might as well have a look outside, then."

Something was wrong. He didn't know what yet, but something was very not-right about things, and he intended to find out what it was.

-BAD WOLF-

Another short one. Hardly a proper apology, I know. I'm terribly sorry about that. D:

This might be a bit happy-making, though. For a while now, I've wanted to set up a [[IncrediblyLamePun companion]] piece to this. (I have a title and everything!) It was to involve… deleted scenes, I suppose you could call them. Anything that would be in here normally, but wasn't for one reason or another. …problem was, I couldn't think of any. As a kind of "BLARGH I AM SO SORRY", along with a possible muse-kickstart/back-into-character-getting thing, I challenge you to challenge me. So… challenge! :D These would be oneshots, obviously, but… well, if you were curious about anything… now's the time to ask. So Yeah.

Also, THIS IS CHAPTER 42. WOOTNESS.

Oh, and happy Christmas again. :)


	43. Hide & Seek, part III

Hello, everyone! …sigh. I've gotten to the point where I almost dislike this thing. It is long, it is weird, it won't DIE, and I know for a fact that at least this series of it is going to be an absolutely massive Old Shame. Gnrgh. Anyway, I hope you guys are getting some enjoyment from this, 'cause it's getting increasingly hard for me to muddle through it.

**This Is Totally An Explanation And Not An Apology And Yes I Am Talking To You, TCASM:** 1. Last Saturday was spent sleeping, as I had been up all night. 2. My original stories are being much more fascinating than this right now. 3. I really, _really _don't like this two-parter. It's being weird and stupid and not listening to me. . 4. I am sorry. :(

SIAPNIAN: Did you know that sensory deprivation is unnerving as frak? 'Cause it is. In other news, ZOMG 600 REVIEWS HOW DID THAT HAPPEN THANK YOU.

**Non-Warning: **Betaed by the glorious TheDisturbedPoet. Who is glorious. And disturbed (Blame stupid people not following canon.). And a poet.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose's journey back to the entrance of the TARDIS was more than a little harrowing. The ship had turned down her lights, and although it certainly helped her hide, it was incredibly frustrating to have to walk without being able to see clearly. She could make out the dim outlines of walls and doors if she focussed, but her eyes were starting to hurt. Whenever she blinked, shadows darted across her vision. If she'd thought to grab a flashlight—

—she wouldn't be able to use it anyway. The TARDIS had turned off the lights for a reason. It was either fumble through the corridors primarily by touch or get caught, and she really didn't want to have to deal with the latter. Not when the Doctor had already been captured.

If it turned out that the aliens didn't actually want to do anything horrible to them—that they wanted to kidnap them and give them cake or something (weirder things had happened to her)—she was going to kill them. Although… The ship would probably know. And since when did people indicate that they wanted to feed you by kidnapping you out of your own ship?

Hmph, Rose thought, and tripped on the grating. Hideously disoriented, she seemed to spin as she stumbled, and only managed to right herself by bumping into a helpful indentation in the wall. She froze, holding her breath as the brief clatter died away, frantically listening for footsteps. She still had her curtain-rod, but without knowing where or even if the aliens would be susceptible to getting hit over the head with it, she'd rather stick to stealth.

Nothing. Rose shook her head briefly and carried on walking. Luckily, the TARDIS's labyrinthine structure seemed to be baffling her hunters just as efficiently as she'd hoped; she only had two other scares before she got to the console room. One of them was solved by ducking into a closet; the other time, she didn't even have to do anything—the creature took a wrong turn down one of the hallways and vanished within seconds.

The console room itself, though, looked to be a problem. Rose hadn't particularly wondered what was going to be waiting for her in there. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she had assumed that it wouldn't be particularly troublesome; she now wanted to hit that part of her brain with something weighty, as she was now confronted with ponderously circling footsteps from the other side of the console.

Of course it would be guarded, she thought. Of _course._ And here she was, with no idea of how to get past the things, apart from creeping along the side and—no, they'd still hear her opening the door.

Rose resolutely glared in the direction of the footsteps. This room was even darker than the others, and the absolute blackness kept her from seeing even the outlines that had aided her in her previous journey.

The TARDIS hummed at her, urging her onwards. She would take care of her invaders. Rose would be safe, but she had to _run_.

There was no time to question the ship. Rose felt for the railing, then followed it as quickly as she dared.

The owner of the footsteps spoke. "I found it," it hissed quickly before pattering towards her. She sped up, following the curve of the railing, dashing down the ramp, opening the door and then slamming it as soon as she was outside the ship.

Rose bit back a cry of pain at the sudden influx of light and kept running, forcing her dazzled eyes to remain open. It wasn't much use; crazy spots of radiance danced across her vision. She couldn't tell if she was being followed. She didn't know where she was going.

Why was it so bright out here?

-BAD WOLF-

The TARDIS was rarely silent. Even when uninhabited, she pulsated with sound, the tiny hums of her machinery tuned into a series of barely-audible melodies. She was quiet about it most of the time—human sleep patterns were easily disrupted, after all—but she sang almost constantly. There had been times when she had howled triumphant arias into the Vortex, sheer delight overtaking her until she disregarded volume. There had been times when she had whispered terrified notes to whoever would listen. There had been times when she had screamed, discordant shrieks tearing through her little atmosphere.

The point was that the old ship had had a lot of time to practise. She had kept her fury in check while her human was still hiding inside her, but now that she didn't need to protect that fragile little mind… well.

Her doors slammed shut. Turning her lights up as far as they would go, the TARDIS unleashed her sonorific wrath upon her intruders. The Doctor was the only person who was allowed to shipjack her, she thought fiercely, and even he hadn't gotten away with it entirely.

Dozens of tiny minds, pressed against her own, withered in pain at her attack. She pursued them, tearing apart their defences, slamming into their brains, and screaming at them in no uncertain terms to _get. Out. Now._

The need to obey their orders dissolved under their instinct to flee, and they did.

-BAD WOLF-

_Ah. You seem to be confused again. Well, I'm certain you'll get through it._

_No, I'm not explaining anything. Not until you apologise. Just because I have technically existed—although not in this form—since the beginning of Time does not mean I'm going senile! I did not forget anything!_

_…all right, I will admit that it is a bit odd that my host and her Time Lord companions are being so incredibly stupid about things—I mean, seriously, two universes are coming apart at the seams and they aren't noticing?—but that just means that they're malfunctioning, not that I am. Mortal minds are far too easy to influence. Something's holding them back, I'm sure. I don't know what it is or why I can't see it, but even the Doctor isn't that stupid._

_The point is that pretty much anything with a modicum of telepathic power, particularly mingled with spatiotemporal sensitivity, can play with even Gallifreyan minds. They're harder to manipulate than humans, but it's far from impossible._

_I am very different. Controlling me, or even swaying me a little, is beyond any power I can think of. I am Time in sentient form. There is nothing anyone can do to get inside my admittedly metaphorical head. I am not the problem here._

_No, I'm not insane! I can't go insane! Aren't you listening to me? I. AM. FINE. They're the problem. They're being influenced by something… I just… I just need to find out what. That's all. No matter how clever it is, it has to have left a trace somewhere. I just… haven't seen it yet. I'll keep looking._

_You still haven't apologised._

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor, Yssa quickly learned, was a truly fascinating individual. Possessed of a kind of manic tranquillity, he spoke and acted almost too quickly for her to follow, while all the time retaining some kind of unspeakable solidity. Her fellows had been right to select him as their species' saviour. Even if their methods were—_no._

She could see why the Time Lord was so legendary on other worlds; he was absolutely captivating. In the space of a few words, he caught her and spun her along his own path, too fast to follow. Yssa had only known him—if she could even call it that—for a few minutes, and already his very existence amazed her. Perhaps that was in part due to her own inexperience with the outside universe, but she couldn't help it. He was magnificent and dangerous and oddly solemn despite his levity and they shouldn't be using him like this—

"Rose?"

They didn't have another choice, she reminded herself. Not one that wouldn't go against everything they knew, anyway. What Yssa and her colleagues were doing was controversial enough; if they reached beyond that, asking external forces for help as opposed to simply manipulating events to suit their needs…

"Rose…"

Besides, the Doctor might be affecting her mind. His race's hypnotic power was almost as well-known as the man himself. Some of it was certainly mythological—more so for her species, as their intelligence on the outside world was restricted to the intergalactic equivalent of eavesdropping—but the basic idea had to come from somewhere. Time Lords had abilities beyond anyone's knowledge (one of the problems of near-extinction). Who knew what he could do, even subdued as he was? She needed to be on her guard.

_"Rose!"_

Yssa suddenly recalled her adopted name and spun to face the Doctor, who was regarding her with a strange mix of concern and a tension she couldn't name.

"Yeah?" She wished she'd done a bit more research on his companion. She had almost no idea how the girl acted, and even if it had taken time to get into the correct part of his memory… If he realised what was going on again, they might not get another chance.

He frowned. "Are you all right?"  
"Yeah," Yssa said, shaking herself a little. Briefly, she wondered how those people managed to walk with only two legs. She'd challenged herself to do so on occasion, but having to do it constantly… "Sorry."

The Time Lord opened his mouth as if to say something, but thought better of it. He observed the console for a few seconds, expression carefully closed. "Okay," he said. "Well. We've landed, obviously; we might as well find out where. Come on."

With that, he snatched his coat up from one of the pillars and swept to the door.

-BAD WOLF-

_Oh, fine. If you insist on being so entirely foiled by a tiny lack of information, so be it. But if you accuse me of going insane again, I may give up telling you this altogether. I have much better things to do than be insulted by a bunch of mortals._

_Anyway. Ahem._

-BAD WOLF-

The Beyerith were quite a normal species once. They evolved, they took over their planet, they built cities and fought wars and constructed civilisations. They ventured to their moons, then to the other planets in their system.

One day, they found that they weren't alone. Another race, this one calling itself the Hyvn'n, made contact. They had been watching the Beyerith, they said. They were impressed with their progress, they said. They wanted to help, they said.

They lied.

The attack came practically from nowhere. The Beyerith planet, Vede, was unusually rich in a substance the Hyvn'n called _gthan_, and they needed no other reason to try and conquer it. Unsuspecting of any threat on that quarter, the species was massacred. The aliens took what they wanted from the world and left it spinning, a cracked hulk devoid of its former glory.

But the Beyerith survived. They rebuilt. And they swore that they would never look to the stars for assistance again; those who lived outside had caused a mini-apocalypse on their first peek—what was there to suggest that all the other species would do the same? Besides, they had survived for millennia by themselves. They didn't need help.

Curiosity kept them looking out, under the guise of suspicion; but it never went beyond curiosity. They looked heavenward, watched other planets reach out, saw wars rage across half the galaxy, and quietly solidified their opinion. Other creatures were not to be trusted. Their planet was not to be touched again.

They didn't count on a second apocalypse, and they certainly didn't expect to need help overcoming it.

-BAD WOLF-

…so, err… it's Saturday somewhere? –cowers from inevitable wrath-

WHAT IS WITH ME AND SHORT CHAPTERS RECENTLY? RASSILON, ME. –shakes head at self-

Also, I found cardboard today, so I'm going to cosplay as a Gender Bended Lightbringer. It's going to be epicsauce. I'm not sure why you guys needed to know, but… well… this is my Babble Area, and I SHALL BABBLE IN IT. MWAHAHAHAHA.

Also also, I know I mentioned this before, but 600 reviews? Seriously? Thank you infinitely. I love you all, despite all indications to the contrary.

Safety and peace!


	44. Hide & Seek, part IV

Hello, me being stupid and only just starting this at 20.41 on Update Day! Let's see how this goes. XD

SIAPNIAN: I have candy. FEAR ME. …also, I went through Ben Drowned again. GAH THE TERROR. I want the Fourth Wall back.

**Non-Warning: **…do I even have to put this here or has it gone the way of the Disclaimer? Also, while it wasn't technically beta-ing, much huggles and thanks to StarryNight101 and Brona19 for varied story!help.

**WARNING:** This… thing has taken on a life of its own that is entirely different from the original plan. And I don't mean "oh, it just goes a different way"—I mean that the entire _concept_ has changed. This was supposed to be a slightly mixed-up reunion!fic and it's turned into… well, I really can't tell you exactly what it's turned into, but it is a hell of a lot bigger than I ever thought it would be. As it only manifested as such a couple of episodes ago, therefore, all foreshadowing towards that officially starts now. Forgive me if it feels rushed, because really, it is, but there's not much I can do about that.

**Happiness:** I DON'T HATE THIS ANYMORE! :D :D :D Thank you, all of you. The non-hating is primarily because of your encouragement.

-BAD WOLF-

Somewhere in between trying to be quiet about her semi-blind stumbling, trying to listen and see if she was being followed, and trying not to think about walls and how much it hurt to slam into them, Rose completely failed to notice the hand grabbing her wrist until it jerked her to a rather sudden and premature halt. Acting purely on instinct, she spun, trying to hit her attacker somehow. Her arm was halted, so quickly that she wondered if her opponent wasn't telepathic.

"Rose! It's okay!" A quiet, urgent, female voice. "I'm with the Doctor!"

She froze, blinking furiously, her vision only just beginning to return without pain. Rose couldn't worry about that, though—had that person just said that she was…? "What?" she asked, maybe a little sharply. Ah, whatever. She was startled. It wasn't every day that one ran into a past/future/present/whatever companion without prior warning.

(It wasn't every day that they knew her name.)

The figure shook her head, straight black hair swishing chaotically with the movement. "Not now," she said. "Come with me."

Rose couldn't really see another option. Still disoriented from her sensory deprivation, she followed the shorter woman, desperately hoping that she wasn't heading straight into a trap.

"You're not heading into a trap."

…Well, then. "Y'know, reading my mind isn't exactly _reassuring_—"

"I didn't read your mind," objected the other humanoid.

"…Right."

A slightly awkward silence then descended. The—future? Past?—companion paused to peer around a corner, then continued walking. "I didn't," she said.

Rose remained sceptical.

"I just…" She sighed. "Look, I can't tell you much, okay? Particularly not when I'm trying to keep us both from getting captured."

Whoever this person was, she was beginning to give off the unmistakably annoying air of "I'm from the future and am therefore going to keep you in the dark about absolutely everything". While it was still possible that the Doctor, wherever he was (don't think about what could be happening to him, just don't), had tripped over a past companion and just happened to tell her Rose's name and to go fetch her…

"Where are we going?" Rose finally asked, getting rather irritated at the silence. To be fair, she was also slightly put off by the creature's very existence (she could rescue the Doctor perfectly well by herself, really), but the whole withholding-information thing wasn't helping.

_"Shh,"_ the woman hissed, glaring back a little. Rose bristled, then jumped when a familiar spiky shape rounded the corner. Her escort, however, seemed to take the creature's sudden appearance relatively in stride. With one fluid motion, she reached into her pocket, whipped out a sonic screwdriver, and flicked it on.

The alien paused, burbled, stared, and crumpled.

Rose gaped at it for a few moments. "What did you do to it?"

"Killed it," the woman said easily, sliding the screwdriver back in her pocket. "Don't tell the Doctor." She paused. "It's… his, by the way," she said faintly. "He let me borrow it."

"Killed it?" Rose repeated dumbly. "But—" A shaky inhalation, Torchwood training suddenly at odds with the Doctor's spasmodic philosophy, a sudden wash of indecision mixed with horror. "If it was vulnerable to the sonic screwdriver, couldn't you have—"

Her accompaniment whipped around, glaring at her, a sudden, startling hardness in her eyes. "It would just wake up again and tell everyone that we're here. We _cannot _let them know that you've escaped or that I'm even here, and it wouldn't stay unconscious long enough for that not to matter." There was a pause, and her gaze seemed to soften almost imperceptibly. "Besides, they have the Doctor."

She was off again, leaving Rose to pick past the corpse, still feeling intensely out of her depth.

-BAD WOLF-

_Who the hell are you? Why are you here? More to the point, why don't I know about you?_

_I seem to be kept in the dark about a lot these days and I do not appreciate it. DO YOU HEAR THAT, WHOEVER'S MESSING WITH MY HUMANOIDS? As soon as I figure out who you are, I am going to hunt you down and… well… I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with you then. It's going to be something horrible, I'm sure._

_I will figure it out, you know. Now that I know there's something definitely wrong—I suppose I do have you… people… to thank for that, but please don't remind me, and don't expect me to bring it up ever again—I'll know to look for it. It can't hide from me forever._

_Even if it could, it wouldn't matter._

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor recognised the planet, if only barely. He'd visited it once, before wars had torn it apart and distrust had set in; it had been beautiful. It was beautiful again, in a way; while the natural landscape still bore the scars, plant life had done its best to seal over the cracks. Deep gouges where lasers had ripped the earth were now covered over by lovely carnivorous flowers; the odd eyih fluttered overhead, screeching unintelligibly.

It was all glorious enough for the Time Lord to momentarily overlook two things: 1. He should be running back into the TARDIS before someone accused him of invading, and B. dear Rassilon, were those _bodies?_

Momentarily forgetting thing number 1, he ran over to the nearest spiky, septopedal lump, kneeling beside it. The Beyerith—male, barely out of adolescence—was dead. _Very _dead. On a scale of still-twitching to skeletal, it was… well, it was dead.

There was a tiny, horrified noise from behind him. Well, that was in character, the tiny part of the Doctor's mind that wasn't involved with _what could have killed him, why is there blood coming out of his… everything, what's going on, will they even accept my help if I give it_ considered. Still, he wasn't going to relax just yet. There was something wrong with his companion, very definitely; perhaps others wouldn't notice it, but he did. He didn't know what had happened, but something had. He just had to figure out what.

No harm in playing along for the time being, though. Something else might slip and simply tell him what was going on.

"What happened to him?"

Ah, now, there was another thing. As far as he knew, Rose hadn't met the Beyerith before, unless she'd run into them with his alternate. Even if she had, she was still having trouble telling gender without extensive thought, even with species she'd previously met. It wasn't a particularly helpful piece of information, but he filed it away as further confirmation that something was Very Wrong.

"I don't know," he answered, quite truthfully. "Thing about the Beyerith—that's what these are, they're the Beyerith—is that they're isolated. Nothing of their history leaks out, because they don't _let _it. I… I had no idea anything like this was going to happen." He ran a hand through his hair, standing up, observing the chaos. "Half the time, I at least have… something, some kind of _notion _of the proper turn of events, but here, I can't tell you." The Doctor paused for breath. "And that worries me. More than a little."

"He looks sick," hazarded Rose.

"He is." The Time Lord glanced over at her. "We're probably safe, though."

She gave a tiny, sad smile. "I'm not worried about that."

"'Kay." He nodded absentmindedly for a moment. "Right. Let's go see if there's anyone left alive. If there isn't, this is going to be a _very _short trip."

-BAD WOLF-

By the time the mystery companion ducked into a closet and closed the door behind them, Rose was more than a little impatient. Who was she? Why was she here? Why had the Doctor let her borrow his screwdriver?

Tamp down the jealousy, Rose—it got you nowhere last time. …or the time before that. Or, if she was being honest, the time before that, but that didn't really matter anymore. Anyway.

"Okay," the dark-haired woman said, turning to her. "We need to stay here for a little while, so you might as well interrogate me now."

"I'm not going to interrogate you," Rose objected, scowling a little.

The other human (?) waved a hand, dismissing the argument. "You know what I mean. You have questions. Ask them."

"Who are you?"

A deep inhalation. "My name is Janet Marie Emerson, I was born on a space station in 23rd century T—"

Rose cut her off. "Don't need your entire history, thanks."

Janet paused. "Right," she said. "Um." Uncomfortably, she shifted from foot to foot. "My name's Janet."

"Human?"

The barest hint of a hesitation. "Not exactly."

23rd century was way past First (Official) Contact. That didn't bother Rose too much. "How did you meet the Doctor?"

She smiled a little. "Long story. And one for another time."

"You can't tell me, right." Rose sighed.

"There were explosions," Janet offered.

"When aren't there?"

A smirk. "Point taken."

Rose wasn't quite ready to like her yet. "How did you know I was here? Did the Doctor send you?"

"In a manner of speaking," Janet hedged. "I knew you, once. You told me what to do."

"And why are you here?"

"To make sure things happen the way they're supposed to."

"What does that mean?"

"What it sounds like." Janet made a slightly exasperated noise, neatly cutting off a similar sound from Rose. "You know I can't tell you everything, Rose, but… this is bigger than you think it is. _Trust _me."

There was a kind of tight earnestness in the woman's hazel eyes. She hadn't exactly been forthcoming about other semi-important things, so Rose didn't bother enquiring further, but she did—tentatively—decide to believe her.

"What, hiding?"

Janet rolled her eyes. "_Waiting._ I know how this plays out. You don't."

Rose glared at her with all the strength she could muster. Now that she could keep her eyes open for more than a second at a time, that was quite a lot. "You said you knew me?"

"Yes."

"Then you know how much I hate—"

"—purposefully enigmatic time travellers telling you what to do?" Janet finished. The corner of her mouth twisted upwards in a half-smile. "Believe me, I do. You warned me about that most effectively."

Rose indecisively hovered between snickering and punching her in the face. Eventually, she decided to sulkily grin and slump against the wall. "Clearly not effectively enough," she muttered. Drummed on the floor with her fingertips. "So what are we waiting for?"

"The Doctor to figure out what's going on." Janet sat down, curling up neatly with her knees to her chest.

"Right. And how long's that gonna take?"

"Umm…" Janet thought, staring intently at the opposite wall for a few moments. "Maybe an hour?"

"And until then we just sit here?" Rose stared at her, mildly aghast. She'd had to wait for the Doctor to do something before, but there was usually running involved, or at least a bomb to defuse.

"Mmhmm." Janet leaned her cheek against her kneecap, regarding her with an unnervingly steady gaze.

Rose felt like bashing her head against something and was promptly concerned with the sudden penchant for self-harm that seemed to crop up every time something like this happened. Instead, she bit at a hangnail for a bit.

Hangnails were not as entertaining as head injuries. "Don't s'pose there's anything else we can do? Save a planet? Overthrow an evil overlord?"

"Well," Janet said slowly, beginning a search through her pockets, "I have video games in here somewhere. That's kind of like overthrowing an evil overlord, isn't it?"

Rose shuddered, instinctively curling into herself. "No thanks," she said. "Got sick of those when I was trapped inside one."

"Meh, your loss." Evidently having found one—did all future companions get access to sonic screwdrivers and Time Lord pockets? Rose wondered—she disentangled it from her coat and turned it on.

-BAD WOLF-

The song must have looped for the eightieth time. There had been a brief, blissful interlude—a dungeon, from Janet's annoyingly laconic explanation—in which the music had changed, but it had in turn come back to… this.

Maybe it was so cheerful-sounding because it knew it was driving Rose insane. And now Janet was humming along to it. Of course she was.

"Doesn't that get boring after a while?"

The woman didn't even look up from the screen, fingers still flying across the buttons. "What?"

"The song."

"No."

Silence. Apart from the stupid music. Rose had to drown it out somehow. "How much longer?"

"42 minutes. Ish."

She was going to die.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor had been walking for much longer than he thought he would be. Surely they'd noticed him by now…

…if there was anyone left to notice, if there was anyone left who _cared_…

He was well within the city now, streets flaring outwards like the spokes of giant wheels, and he had yet to see a sign of life. The stench of death clogged the air, but he tried not to think about that.

Maybe there were just too many to dispose of properly. Maybe the survivors were being so utterly practical that they weren't worrying about it until the problem was fixed. Maybe this city alone had been wiped out. They couldn't _all _be dead.

If there were any survivors, they'd be somewhere in the centre. That was what the Doctor hoped, anyway. He had no idea how the culture had changed (_if _the culture had changed). He had no idea whether they'd even be gathering, or if they'd instinctively scatter for fear of contamination. He had no idea—

_Don't think about it._

Whatever it was, he hoped he found someone else alive soon. One of the less-enjoyable parts of being a time traveller was the fact that, even with the TARDIS, he always seemed to show up just a little too late.

The Time Lord was forcibly jarred out of his internal monologue by a voice. "Who the _niht_ are you?"

He spun around to face the creature. Ah, he thought, after half a moment's reflection. The good news: Someone was still alive. The bad news: They didn't look particularly happy to see him.

-BAD WOLF-

…err, seems I'm ten minutes late here. Just for future reference, if I'm stupid enough not to finish the chapter _before _all of my betas have passed out, it's going to be delayed until Sunday. I'm sorry about that.

On the bright side, though, that gave me more time to iron out a couple of problems I was having, and to increase the wordcount by around 200-300 words, so… it wasn't all bad, right? …right?

BTW, I've been mentally sketching out the next few series of this. It, err, is going to get a bit dark eventually. …yeah. Thus, Janet. I promise all of her whatnot is justified; it just doesn't look like it is yet.

Anyway.

In other news, OMG LIGHTBRINGER = EPIC WIN. Yes, I'm reading it again. Hrngh. –happiness-

Safety and peace!


	45. Hide & Seek, part V

Hello again! I got better. I started this on 17.26 on Update Day. XD In my defence, though, there were computer errors to be figured out and half of my abdomen feels recently stabbed.

**Excuse:** Last Saturday was spent in a rare occurrence wherein I experienced a social event not Internet-based. I'm sure you can understand why I would wish to observe the phenomenon with my full concentration. :P (Lookie, TCASM! I got through that entire paragraph without apologising!)

SIAPNIAN: Biscuits to the first person who figures out how to temporarily shut off pain-recepty-whatnot-things in the brain without damaging them. Ow.

-BAD WOLF-

Yssa was tentatively beginning to hope. The Doctor's behaviour had started out seeming erratic and suspicious, necessarily making her rather nervous (how many more reboots could even _his _mind take before it started to shut down?), but the more she saw of it the more she suspected that "erratic" was his natural state of being. He did nothing normally. The legends about him portrayed him as almost a godlike figure—yet another reason to be nervous around him; such labels had a tendency to initiate some rather frightening character traits—and she supposed she could see why, but... He was all too obviously mortal. He was enigmatic, he was awe-inspiring, he very rarely made any sense, but he didn't come across to her as anything but a very clever member of a very impressive species.

That made the Beyerith relax somewhat, which in turn seemed to make him to do the same. She knew very well that her portrayal of his companion was incomplete; she'd known that from the start. She'd just hoped that the hyperactive strangeness that seemed to power the Time Lord would allow him to overlook the detail. And, as she grew tentatively more sure of herself in his presence, she thought he accepted her more. Admittedly, that was probably more the machine than any particular luck or skill on her part. It was designed to initiate a kind of dream-state, to suppress niggling doubts.

It wasn't as if she was given much of a chance to do anything, after all. The Doctor was off in his own little world, zigzagging across the street in a way that would get him run over under normal circumstances (the same normal circumstances that would forbid him from being there in the first place, she tried not to remind herself). One moment he was sniffing walls, the next he was staring at his hands or the buildings or the sky, the next he was... looking at her... rather intently...

Yssa shook herself back into the present. "What?"

"Hmm?" He raised his eyebrows as if he hadn't just been trying to peel off her fake skin with his mind. "Oh. Sorry. It's just... you've been a bit quiet. Are you all right?"

Concern for his companion. Did he regard them more than the legends said he did? "No," Yssa answered, truthfully enough. "Dead bodies do that to you."

"Right." The Doctor glanced at a bit of leaf skittering across the street. "'Course. I'm sorry."

She shrugged. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. "You didn't do it," she informed him.

"All the same, I'm sorry." He was staring at her again. "I bring you to a lot of places with corpses, don't I?"

Fear—was that a trap or a quiet acknowledgement? She couldn't tell. In lieu of a proper answer, she shrugged again.

He didn't seem to need more of an answer, which was a relief. "Come on," the Doctor murmured, starting to walk again. "Let's hope there are fewer of them over here."

There were. After several minutes of uncomfortable silence, one of the pre-programmed drones finally found them.

"Who the _niht_ are you?"

Well, it was about v'hishting time.

-BAD WOLF-

Faced with a choice between the never-ending music and an oddly timed nap, Rose decided to take the latter. She never really knew when she would get the chance to do so, after all. Janet would wake her up when she needed to, they (something in her rebelled against the plural, but it had to be thought) would go and rescue the Doctor, and then maybe she could wrench some actual answers out of the new girl. That last bit was probably unlikely, but if there was one thing that Rose had learned over her travels, it was that anything was possible. How else would she be able to find _him _again after she'd been flung as far distant as a creature could?

As she dozed, she waited for the tiny voice that inevitably whispered that it wasn't really him, you know, and—oh, there it was, but… well, she wasn't sure what went after that "but", but something did.

She'd think about it when she woke up, Rose decided, and descended farther into slumber.

-BAD WOLF-

_Excellent. She's easier to talk to when she's sleeping. They generally are. Hopefully I'll be able to force some sense into her before I have to resort to… other methods._

_What? The universes are falling apart! Can't you hear it? …No? You can't? You are honestly telling me that you can't even feel the slightest shift in established events? You're hopeless! All of you! I would have thought that even your species could tell when entire worlds were disintegrating just a few parallels away, but no. Of course not._

_At least a few echoes are reaching my Doctor. I never thought I'd have to content myself with mere echoes, but it's all I have right now._

_Ridiculous._

-BAD WOLF-

Link spun around several times in rapid succession before vanishing with a rather annoying _pop_. Janet—it was probably best to think of herself with that moniker; one never really knew who might be listening, and Rose had exhibited some telepathic instincts in the past—glared at the screen for a few moments, resisting the ever-present urge to throw the miniaturised console against the wall. She contented herself, instead, with violently switching it off and shoving it back into her pocket. She'd had enough of that game, at least.

_Facts floating into her head—24th century, rise of holographic gaming systems initiated a wave of nostalgia for the classics, henceforth re-released in more manageable form. Explosions death destruction and a girl (Li) had given that to her after—_

Consciously, she switched off her internal monologue. Janet liked her new brain. She really did. It could hold facts that she would never have remembered otherwise. But sometimes... sometimes it was just too _loud._ She couldn't think through all the thoughts in her head.

What time was it? Ah, never mind that. She already had her little miniature timer, ticking down inside Rose's brain. She could feel her dreams pressing against the edges of her awareness, but not yet. Not yet. And she knew how unpleasant this particular dream was.

Janet decided that she rather liked being the one from the future. It was annoying as hell on the other side of the equation, but this was rather amusing. Knowing exactly what was going to happen every second was... somehow enjoyable. Hmm.

Seconds passed. It was getting closer, wasn't it? She could feel… well, there was no way of telling without actually going inside.

Janet grinned. She'd always wanted to do this.

-BAD WOLF-

_Rose ran. She ran faster than she thought she ever had—no, seriously; she didn't even know that she could go this quickly—because she had to, because she didn't know what was chasing her but it was catching up it was always catching up how why what_

_(it howled her name again, and her mind filled with images of golden eyes and arrogance and rage, little mouse with the power of a lion, but still so fragile, so fragile)_

_It whispered and screamed around her, it was her friend (it was her) but if it was her friend then why did it scare her like this?_

_(please leave me alone)_

_Come back—Rose, come back—_

_(I don't want to)_

_Hesitation by her pursuer, shock at herself (why?) and she kept running until_

_"Rose."_

_Janet? What was she doing here? Rose stopped almost instantly, suspicious. The urge to flee wasn't as bad around her, strangely enough; she could feel the predator stalking her in the darkness, but there was a sphere of space around the future companion that it would not enter._

_"Janet?"_

_She smiled a little, arms crossed nonchalantly against her chest. "Rose, wa_ke up."

Rose snapped back into reality, blinking at the woman sitting across from her, poking her in the leg with her foot.

"Hey," Janet said, grinning slightly. "Welcome back."

"How long was I out?" The blonde stretched quickly, eagerly letting the remnants of the dream slip into the back of her mind.

"Thirty-seven minutes. Don't know why you even bothered."

"Better than listening to that song again," Rose grumbled, getting to her feet. "We off?"

Janet nodded. "Follow me."

-BAD WOLF-

"This is an interesting turn of events," the Beyerith before the Doctor stated.

The Time Lord, still shifting in his makeshift handcuffs, nodded absently. Well, he thought, that at least answered the question of whether anyone else was alive. He did wish that the circumstances had been slightly more agreeable, though.

"Who are you?" Not-Rose asked. "What do you want?"

"I am Beil," said the lead Beyerith. "I want my people to be restored. I do _not _want you here. However, not much can be done on that count until the first is resolved."

The Doctor perked up. This was interesting.

"How long's that going to take you?" he asked lightly. "Busy life, me. Can't just sit here and wait for you to figure out what's killing everyone." He had his suspicions by now; if he could just nudge them into admitting something…

The Beyerith twitched. Beside him, Not-Rose glanced over, expression unreadable. _(Where was the real one? What had they done to her? If she was hurt, this planet's First Contact would look like a minor misunderstanding.)_

He forced his slightly less admirable traits into the background. Going on a vengeful rampage when he didn't even know if one was necessary was going to help nothing. Right now, he needed to figure out what was happening.

"Not as quickly as I would like," the alien said flatly, "but I'm certain we'll find a way to cure the plague."

"You have no idea, do you?" the Doctor asked quietly. "You don't know what this is."

Beil paused. "Not yet."

If he was right, this should be far easier than it… should have been. "Let me help," he said. "If you've been looking outside at all, you should have heard of me."

Still gazes. Not the slightest indication of any emotion in any of their faces. It was oddly unnerving, but he had other things to worry about.

"I'm clever, I've dealt with worse, I can help you. Please."

The Beyerith opened his mouth, but was interrupted. A smaller alien, standing off to the side and almost out of sight, spoke before he had the chance.

"Beil, he's right," she said softly.

The creature glared at her. "We cannot," he snapped. "You know—"

"They're _dying_," she said. "Heiy, do we have another option available to us?"

A third Beyerith considered the question for a moment. "None so convenient."

"_Very _convenient," insisted Beil.

"He's the Doctor," said the second alien. "You know as much of him as any of us."

A second passed.

Another.

A third.

"Very well." Beil backed up a half-step, voice tight. "Help us, then." Then, even more stiffly, "Please."

Too easy. The Time Lord sniffed and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Okay," he said quietly. "But not like this."

Not-Rose gave him a look somewhere between surprise, grim expectation, and horror. He hadn't even known that her borrowed face could do that. Fascinating.

There was the barest hint of hesitation from those opposite him. "What do you mean?"

He glanced over at Not-Rose. "They're projections, aren't they? Completely, I mean. We're _all _projections, the only difference is that I'm a real person controlling mine and something tells me… you are as well."

Not-Rose's face fell. Literally. Extra limbs sprouted out of her torso, her legs fused together and then grew more legs, her eyes multiplied. The Doctor grimaced a little, never having been fond of that particular holographic ability.

"What did we do?" the resulting Beyerith asked quietly, tiredly.

He grinned suddenly. "What, so you can try again? Sorry, no. And besides, even if I told you, it wouldn't do anything. You see—" he was in full exposition mode now, pacing around the room and all its eerily-still aliens—"in all but the absolute _best_ alternate-reality projectors of your century, there always have been and always will be errors. Tiny things, really, but obvious if you're looking for them. For instance, the eyih at the start of the projection. Notice anything strange about it?"

The Beyerith didn't answer, naturally.

The Doctor, unfazed, continued. "It never shifted pattern. They're scavengers; why didn't it go after the corpses? Same goes with the clouds, the wind, the dust, the debris… the same objects, doing the same thing, looping back around as soon as we turned our backs. And one more thing," he added, turning to face Not-Rose. "This projection can trick your eyes. It could trick human eyes. You didn't account for my species, though, did you?" Wiggled his fingers. "Pixels."

The creature had remained stationary enough for the Time Lord to almost doubt her existence, but now she slumped. "What else were we going to do?" she asked, voice barely audible. Her species lacked the ability to cry, but she shook like she was about to, the involuntary action peculiarly helpless-looking. "We're dying, Doctor, and we can't go to anyone. Even with your brain monitored for deceit, we had to keep this operation a secret; if they knew…"

"They'd prefer it to death."

She glared at him. "They still think we're going to fix this ourselves," she said. "We always have. Even if we told them otherwise, they wouldn't believe us, so what other choice did we have?"

The Doctor blinked at her for a moment. "You haven't _told _them?"

The Beyerith shifted from foot to foot (to foot to foot to foot to foot to foot, but who was counting?) and developed a sudden inability to look him in the eye. "They're already dying," she muttered. "There's no sense in getting them to panic as well."

Time was too much of an issue for him to start dissecting that statement. "Let me go," he said, "and I will help you."

"I can't do that."

"No, you can. You just won't."

"You don't understand," she snapped. "I _can't_. I was the only one constantly monitoring you, there isn't a way out from the inside, and I don't know how long it'll take before someone out there finds out we're in here."

"Not too long, I expect," the Doctor said calmly. "You see, the reason you had to come here in the first place is still out there. She'll find me."

The Beyerith snorted lightly. "She'll be caught before she even gets out of your ship. I wouldn't put too much faith in her."

"I would."

-BAD WOLF-

They had only been walking for a few minutes when, quite abruptly, Janet stopped. Rose turned to look at her, confused, startled by her expression. Was that nervousness? No…

"What's wrong?" she asked, frowning.

"He can't see me yet," Janet answered, staring intently at a wall. "He'll know."

That wasn't confusing. "Know _what?_"

Janet gave her an exasperated look.

"Right. Can't tell me." Rose sighed.

The shorter woman gave her a little smile. "He's just ahead," she told her. "Turn right at the intersection, first door on the left. Use the screwdriver. Don't worry."

"Why would I?"

"You'll see." Infuriating little smirk.

Rose rolled her eyes, then paused. "So… guess this is goodbye, then."

A nod. "For now." There was a flash of what might have been regret, but it was quickly stolen away by another bright grin. "See you later, Rose."

Before she had a chance to reply with more than a syllable, Janet turned a corner and vanished.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor that greeted Janet on her return to the TARDIS was not the one that Rose was attempting to rescue. She'd almost come to terms with that thought, but somewhere in the back of her head, there was always the golden glow and the screaming—

She'd get used to this brain one day, she resolved.

"All finished?" the Doctor asked of her. His hair—dark brown in this light—was sticking up in odd directions and seemed to have a stray wire from the console tangled in it; he'd been working under the console again, then. Not surprising. The timeship still smoked, after…

"Yeah," she replied. "You're going to wake up in two minutes."

"Excellent," the Time Lord replied, propping the door open for her.

Before she was all the way inside, he spoke again.

"I know you killed them."

Janet froze. "Had to." She didn't need to question how he knew. He always knew.

"No, you didn't." His voice was tired. Hers probably was as well; they'd been over that issue enough times that it had gotten quite stale. Oh well.

One day, maybe, he'd fix her. And then everything would be right again. Until then, she could set that aside in favour of asking where they were going next.

-BAD WOLF-

Please note that the non-Ten!Doctor at the end is not Eleven, but an original Doctor TheDisturbedPoet and I made up, affectionately nicknamed Emerson!Doctor. (In our minds, he is played by the esteemed Michael Emerson, [yes, I know, he comes from the wrong part of the planet, but we can dream, yeah?] thus the name.) I'm borrowing him for this series because I love him very much and still can't quite get used to canon!Eleven.

…well, it's only an hour and a bit late this time… that's good, yeah? And I actually broke 3,000 words! Woot!

Love to you all! I'll see you next week.


	46. Disillusioned, part I

Yo. ^_^

**This Is Not An Apology:** This is not an apology. FRAK YES I'M NOT APOLOGISING. :D Admittedly, I was kind of hoping to do the shorter chapter earlier in the week so you'd still have your 2,500-3,000-word chapter today, but school happened, and originalfic happened, and there was a lot of happening going on and it all happened at once in a great big Happening that looked at my puny plans and went, "lolno." But I'm still following the technical rules, and this is a bit longer than my usual Starting Off The Episode Now chapters, so...

SIAPNIAN: A couple of you mentioned that you had theories regarding Janet's identity/history. Obviously, I'm not going to tell you if you're right or not, but I'd really love to hear them if you're willing to tell them. ^_^

-BAD WOLF-

Well, Rose thought as she rounded the corner, at least Janet's directions had been specific. Even if nothing else regarding her was. That seemed to be pretty normal among future companions, though; she hoped that if she ever ended up meeting another (she tamped down a brief burst of guilt at how she'd reacted to Sarah-Jane, but that didn't matter anymore) past companion, she wouldn't be that—

—_alien footsteps behind_—

Before she could even think about it, Rose had darted across the hallway and into the room Janet had indicated. The door opened and closed with complete silence; it'd creeped her out before, but now she couldn't be more grateful. A cursory inspection of the surroundings indicated that there were no immediate threats to be found. Even so, she waited, listening until the faint _click-click-click _of insectoid legs faded into the distance.

Rose let herself exhale. Right, then.

The Doctor, for once in his life, was ridiculously simple to find. Two tables, only one of them looking remotely meant for humanoids, were directly in the centre of the room. The one with the unconscious alien on it gave her pause, but he/she/it (how was she supposed to know?) didn't look to be anything to worry about for a while. So, as she was wont to do, Rose turned her attention to the Time Lord.

Cords and plugs and who knew what were draped all over him, a complex network of thin white wires connecting him to the table and the table to the wall. Buttons and screens and controls looked to be everywhere but the floor and the ceiling. How was she supposed to know what to disconnect? Janet hadn't told her what to do, just where to go. Surely that meant that whatever Rose did was going to turn out with him still alive.

Unless he was meant to regenerate today.

_Don't think that._

Consciously searching for a distraction, Rose's gaze fell on the Doctor himself. She wished she could say that he looked peaceful. His expression certainly didn't give anything away, but she'd lived with the man for she didn't even _know _how many years, and she knew when something was wrong.

This regeneration, his skin had always been pretty pale; but now it looked unhealthily so. The shadows under his eyes could have been exhaustion to the untrained observer, but Time Lords were rarely subject to that. Worse than all of that was the _stillness_—Rose had to take a moment to make sure he was even breathing. Even when unconscious, he'd always been recognisably alive; there was a thrumming kind of energy around him all the time.

Except now.

Almost terrified to touch him, Rose rested a fingertip against his cheek. "What did they do to you?"

-BAD WOLF-

Ten minutes, forty-seven seconds.

Ten minutes, forty-eight seconds.

Ten minutes, forty-nine seconds.

Ten minutes—

"I'm sorry, Doctor," Yssa said suddenly, the first words anyone had spoken for ten minutes and fifty seconds.

The Time Lord looked over at her. "For what?"

The Beyerith straightened and began to pace. "They told me you'd just automatically help us," she said. "Even when you figured it out I thought that maybe… but I can't."

She wasn't making sense, but the Doctor didn't particularly like where he thought this was going.

"I don't know how long it took you to find out what we did," she continued agitatedly, "but it can't be worth just _sitting _here waiting for someone who's not going to come."

The Doctor glared at her a little. "She _is_."

Yssa ignored him. "So I'm sorry," she repeated, "but I have to do this." Visually, she did nothing. She closed her eyes and seemed almost to frown for a moment. The effects, though, were almost immediate: the ground trembled almost imperceptibly, then abruptly began to fall away, walls crumbling and ceiling exploding into violent white.

A female voice, clipped and computerised, came from everywhere around him. _"System reset initiated."_

The Doctor scrambled to his feet, shouting a negative as if he'd be able to stop the process mid-way, but it was too late even if she did change her mind.

_"Please remain stationary while system reset is in progress,"_ said the computer's voice sternly. He ignored it. Errors would only make the situation worse, but he couldn't wait for the illusion to start up again without at least _trying _to fight it.

_"System reset in 3…"_

Memories started to vanish. With his brain, it wouldn't take too long to drag them back out again, but that was only if he remembered that they were missing… and it was a thoroughly unsettling process, anyhow.

_"2…"_

Rose would get here soon. It would be fine. Maybe it would take one or two more loops, but the Doctor could deal with that. …not without his brain going a bit wibbly, but when _hadn't_ his brain been a bit wibbly? More wibbliness was hardly something to be feared. Much.

He was so tangled up in that line of thought that it took him a few moments to notice that the computer had never finished counting. And then another couple of moments to realise that the room wasn't spontaneously resetting, it was… fading.

_Rose?_

It was disorienting, realising that one's eyelids were shut when one had been absolutely convinced that they weren't. The Doctor, though, being an open-minded soul, adapted to the idea quickly. He then discarded it in favour of—_ow ow ow why was it so bright?_

"Careful," a voice murmured—so familiar and missed that it actually hurt a little. He sat up, opening his eyes despite the light, and took in the welcome sight of his companion. Still suspicious, he narrowed his eyes at the edge of her jaw, looking for tiny telltale inaccuracies; reached up, gently ran his fingers down her cheek to see if it felt the same…

Rose's eyes widened just a bit as she stared at him, leaning (involuntarily?) into the touch. The air may or may not have shivered. "Doctor?"

Suddenly, the Time Lord was overcome by the irrepressible sense that he had done something Very Wrong. Everything was in order (as far as he could tell, retorted a slightly paranoid part of his brain). There was no need to continue the contact.

He dropped his hand to his side, but carried on studying her. There was nothing condemnable about simply _looking _at her, after all.

Rose tilted her head at him a little, a puzzled frown furrowing her brow. "You all right?" she asked. He tried very hard not to notice the faint, pinkish tinge to her cheeks and failed.

The Doctor's mouth twitched into a half-smile. "Better," he said quietly. Then, abruptly, he stood. "Took you long enough," he informed her. "Come on."

Still distracted by the events of the previous few seconds, he didn't see the Beyerith coming down the hall until he'd nearly run into him.

-BAD WOLF-

All right, fine, I'll give myself the first prompt for Interludes. :P

Love to you all! –sends love- Hopefully, I shall see you on Saturday. …hopefully. XD Although, what with my… past habits… ergh.


	47. Disillusioned, part II

Hello there, everyone! Metaphorically strap yourselves in; this is going to be a long A/N.

**Mention of Mourning:** This isn't _quite_ a dedication, because really, he deserves better than fanfiction, but… anyway. Brian Jacques, A.K.A. the man responsible for half my childhood _and _one of the main reasons I got into writing in the first place, died on the 5th. The Internet didn't mention it to me until two days afterwards, or I would have done this sooner, but… well. Not much to be done about that. So… mourning. Horrendously late mourning, but mourning nonetheless. (Later now, what with… well.)

**Another Mention of Mourning:** Nicholas Courtney. D: D: D: WHY IS EVERYONE DYING? –epic sadness-

Absurdly Routine Apology: Week 1 was clogged by homework, week 2 clogged by homework and Oh, I'm Not Able To Go On That Field Trip To England After All angst. Someday I'll figure out how to separate ficcing from the real world. . For now, though, apologies.

SIAPNIAN: Just noticed how long I've been working on this fic. Gah.

**Gratitude:** Because you guys read and like this fic, you allowed me to accidentally complete a rather difficult bit of homework _three years before it was assigned._ You are amazing, amazing people.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose was mildly disturbed by the fact that her first instinct, upon being faced by a spiky alien who may or may not want to murder her, was to reach for her sonic screwdriver. She was even more disturbed by her disappointment when she realised she didn't know which setting would kill the thing. When had she gotten so violent?

When had Janet? When had her respective Time Lord decided not to care? …When had Rose started thinking of him as "theirs"? _Why?_

Luckily, the Doctor was not overly burdened by such thoughts. Well, that, or his brain was advanced enough to not get too caught up in them. Whatever. Either way, he maintained a sufficient level of awareness to snatch her hand and drag her into a run.

Right. Running. Always a good place to start.

"What's the plan?" she asked him, having recovered from a brief trip early on in their escape attempt.

"Working on it," the Doctor returned, sounding slightly… annoyed? Was that it? No, not quite…

Something was wrong. Rose didn't know where Janet had gone, didn't know if she was coming back, but presumably she'd be quite careful not to be anywhere the older companion went. If they went to the closet, surely it would be vacated, and Rose could interrogate the Doctor properly.

"This way," she said, and pulled him along a familiar corridor. Hopefully there wasn't anything in the way; every instinct the blonde companion had was screaming at her to get him somewhere safe, and her blind run had ensured that she had no idea where the TARDIS was. There was nowhere else for them to go, and if someone stopped them…

Rose rounded a corner and was suddenly confronted by a fresh Beyerith corpse. A sudden, hysterical kind of joy overwhelmed her, and she suppressed a slightly psychotic giggle.

"Janet," she murmured, both as a half-explanation to the Doctor and a somewhat ineffective thanks to the future companion. Reassured, she sped up, finally locating and ducking inside the closet that had previously hidden her. There was no guarantee that it would do so again, but if it had gone untouched for almost an hour the last time…

Well. It was worth a shot, anyway.

The light was still on, no one was inside, and all in all it seemed pretty much unchanged from the last time Rose had seen it. For the first time since she'd ventured out of the closet in the first place, she let herself relax. Sagging lightly against the door, she exhaled and—

_Thump._

Startled, she spun around, trying to see what had caused the rogue noise. Nothing immediately leapt to her vision, but a bit of brown just at the bottom edge of her eyes…

_"Doctor?"_

Rose's movement didn't even require thought. She hadn't even known that she was doing it at all; one moment, she was standing and looking around, and the next she was on her knees next to the (unconscious?) Time Lord crumpled on the floor. Mindlessly, she chanted his name, cradling his head between her hands, searching for any sign that he hadn't just _collapsed_ while she wasn't looking.

The Doctor scowled, just a little. "Ow," he informed her.

Rose tried to form a coherent statement, but most of her vocabulary had melted in her fear. "Doctor?"

"I'm fine, I just…" He trailed off, shifting. He'd fallen against a shelf, so he had ended up in an awkward half-sit; with effort, he pushed himself into a more comfortable position. "Woke up too quickly. It takes time even with willing immersion…"

He wasn't making sense. Almost unconsciously, Rose threaded her fingers through his hair, trying to check for bumps. Or blood. Or other things that may or may not have begun with B, but definitely signalled something wrong.

"Mmph," he commented, and she couldn't tell if it was a negative reaction or not.

"Sorry," she apologised anyway, instinctively pulling her hands away.

Instantly, his eyes flew open. His reflexes had always been too quick for her to follow; as it was, he caught her wrist before she even noticed that he was moving. There was a frozen half-moment in which they both sat there, staring at each other.

"Doctor," Rose said carefully, "what did they do?"

The Time Lord sighed, relaxing, the tension in his wiry form slackening. His grip on her arm loosened, his hand sliding down to hers. His eyes dropped from hers, staring at their hands instead. "They inserted me into a virtual reality against my will," he said. "My perception of the real world was suppressed, they wiped my memory, and they restarted the process every time I found out what was going on."

"…Which means?" It wasn't her first time dealing with a virtual reality; it was her first time seeing the results of forcible insertion into one. Frankly, she didn't really want to see it again.

The Doctor traced seemingly random lines on her skin, across her palm, along her fingertips, pressing against her tendons. Rose frowned, confused, but not protesting. "Mind just went through some trauma, that's all," he murmured. "Fought against it too hard. Woke up too quickly."

"Sorry."

His eyes abruptly focussed on hers again. "_You_," he said, accenting the syllable as if it carried some infinite truth, "were perfect."

Rose wasn't entirely sure how to react to that.

"I'll be fine," he promised, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the shelf. "Just need to rest a bit."

"Are you sure?" she half-whispered. She'd seen the Doctor in a lot of states, but the last time she'd seen him so… _delicate_ was back when he'd regenerated. And that hadn't even been this him. (Strange, how easy it was to accept that now. She'd changed so much from the shop-girl who'd first taken his hand.)

The Doctor murmured an affirmative, still refusing to open his eyes.

"You going to sleep?" she asked, simultaneously amused and worried by this idea. Was it even okay for him to sleep in this state?

"Probably," he replied. Actually, it was more like "pr'b'y", but she assumed that was what he meant.

"That all right?"

"Mmhmm."

He still hadn't let go of her hand, and Rose didn't quite have the heart to move away from him. Noting his impending unconsciousness and continued unwillingness to not be touching her in some way (paradoxically unnerving in its own way; what had _happened_ to him in there?), she compromised. Sliding carefully across the floor to avoid jostling him, she settled in beside him and rested her head against his shoulder.

She hoped he'd wake up soon. She didn't know how long they had before the Beyerith discovered them. But then Janet would have taken care of it, wouldn't she? Whatever else the woman was, she was good at that, at least.

Perhaps Rose could accept her existence. She generally started to like people more after they helped save the Doctor's life.

-BAD WOLF-

_It would be just like… someone like Janet to leave without the slightest bit of explanation as to why she was even there. I tried to get inside her head, but something stopped me. Again._

_I think it's the same thing that keeps making me… forget things. (And yes, that hurts to say.) There can't possibly be more than one thing that could… could… restrain me like this. I didn't even think there could be one such entity. There shouldn't be._

_There won't be. I can't let things go on like this. Keep going; I'll let you know when I've found it._

-BAD WOLF-

Yssa pulled herself away from the illusions, watching the ceiling swirl into reality. A quick glance to her left confirmed her fears; the Doctor was gone. Rose had come. Either that, or someone else figured out what they were doing here…

No. If that had occurred, the room wouldn't be empty, and she certainly wouldn't have come around on her own. No, the Doctor had escaped.

Yanking the wires away from herself with a desperate kind of ferocity, the young Beyerith scrambled to her feet. A muffled curse tore itself from her mouth and she tried, unsuccessfully, to run out the door. The universe spun and she slipped, crashing to the floor, whimpering in pain as she hit the unforgiving surface. But she _couldn't _stop. She couldn't rest. She had to find the Doctor before he ruined everything, because that was what he _did _to people he didn't like. She highly doubted that he particularly liked any of her species; not after what they did to him.

_It was necessary. It was necessary. It was necessary._ She couldn't regret it.

That wasn't the point, anyway. The Doctor couldn't have gotten far, Yssa mused; in his current state, he'd be lucky if he made it a few hallways before he collapsed. Admittedly, the entire base ran in a network that confused even those who had made it, but surely she wouldn't have _too _much to search.

Some part of her niggled at her to use the equipment detecting the life-signs on the base, but the concept was quickly discarded. The isolated nature of the Beyerith had ensured that there wouldn't be a point to allowing for aliens to be traced. Yssa had never hated that philosophy more than she did at the moment of that revelation; and considering she'd spent the past few months patiently trying to circumvent those laws—even to the point of sacrificing several parts of her moral code—that was impressive.

Just because the Time Lord and his companion couldn't have gone beyond a couple of minutes' run didn't mean she had the time to contemplate what had brought her here, Yssa reminded herself sternly, and she pushed herself to her feet again. She should alert the guards, she thought…

…but then, the entire base would know of her failure. She had watched the Doctor vanish from the simulation, slept while he was running. Admittedly, it had taken time to remove herself from the computer, but all the same, she shouldn't have… She should have had someone there while she was under the virtual reality's influence. She shouldn't have _allowed_ him to escape.

No, Yssa would try to do this on her own. Sneak under the radar. There was still a chance that her negligence could go overlooked if she found them quickly enough.

And how was she going to restrain them, once she found them? The unwelcome thought pressed against her brains as she walked. They weren't exactly going to get up and willingly return. Besides, even if she did locate them again, the Doctor would just break through the illusion like he had the other times.

Unless Rose had been the reason he rebelled, again. Her absence had tipped him off the first times, her strange behaviour the last; while the other evidence was undeniably separated, he might not think to look for anything amiss if she was there and insisting that everything was fine.

Well, Yssa would deal with that later. For now, she needed to find them, and quickly. Her superiors might check back in at any second.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor floated in a vague kind of haze. He'd promised Rose he would be fine, but he wasn't entirely sure about that now; he'd spent a lot of energy fighting off the machine's attempts to rewire his head, and the constant alterations to his thoughts had left him feeling weak and vulnerable. Every few seconds, terror flashed through him at the idea that maybe he hadn't escaped, maybe he'd just been sent into a deeper illusion, a better one; what better way to trick him than to make him think he was free?

He focussed on details. The exact pattern of the swirls in Rose's fingerprints, the smooth fragility of her bones beneath her skin, the mild scent of her hair as it brushed against his cheek. No false reality could replicate those, because he was the only one who knew them all. He clung to that thought as he spun inside his own mind, trying to recover, trying to work up the strength to wake up.

Not that the Time Lord was asleep, exactly. But he definitely wasn't conscious, or even capable of being so. Not for a while yet. He didn't know how long, and that worried him immensely. How long had he been _in_ there? How much damage had already been done? They had to be looking for him, and if they found him, he couldn't run. If they found him, Rose _wouldn't_; the dear woman would try to save him, she always did… but…

Fighting to resurface only deepened the wounds, exacerbated the weariness. He had to wait. He didn't have a choice.

The Doctor was just trying to sink into a deeper level of unconsciousness when he heard the door whirr open. A swift inhalation from Rose, startled movement, and her reassuring presence next to him vanished; what was happening? He tried to open his eyes, tried to _see_, but he was so tired and he didn't even know where his eyes were anymore, let alone how to operate them…

…and the effort of trying to wake up even that much sent him spinning down into utter blackness.

-BAD WOLF-

_Shh! Shhhh! Yes, I hear you! Now shut up and let me listen!_

_…_

_Something else is here. I can feel it. Can't talk right now. Go back._

_I'll catch up to you later._

-BAD WOLF-

Short _and _late. Fhtagn. . I'm sorry.

That whole "give self prompts for Interludes" thing? Yeah, it didn't work. . Back to you guys, then.

Love to you all! Be well.


	48. Disillusioned, part III

Attempt 1 to separate fanficcing from rest of life. Let's hope this works. …OMG IT DID. WOAH.

**Apology #284: **Homework. Again. After this Thursday, though, I won't have any of it (from those classes) for two weeks, so… hopefully things won't get as bad as they did.

**Non-Warning:** Betaed by TheDisturbedPoet and StarryNight101.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose stared at the spiky alien in front of her. The spiky alien in front of her stared back. For three seconds, nothing happened; they just gawked, each seeming just as surprised and frightened to see the other as the other was to see them.

Then, suddenly, several hundred thoughts crashed into Rose's awareness at once, most of them fragmented and all of them having to do with the Doctor, and she backed up instinctually as she whipped out her sonic screwdriver. She still had no idea what settings would be effective, but he/she/it/they/whatever didn't know that.

"Don't move," she said, very quietly. Her voice trembled a very little on the first syllable, but was overall surprisingly steady considering the circumstances. Maybe the fact that the alien looked just as terrified as she felt helped.

It backed up a step, seeming almost to curl into itself, entire being fixated on the screwdriver. "Rose," it said, somehow managing to sound nervous and resigned at the same time.

The human stared at the creature. "How d'you know my name?" she asked suspiciously. She had gotten surprisingly nonchalant about the idea of aliens knowing who she was. Anyone who travelled with the Doctor would eventually become legendary to _some _extent. What did shock her, though, was the fact that this particular alien recognised her.

The being in question seemed almost amused. And disheartened. Was it capable of feeling anything without having a paradoxical emotion on top of it? "He wouldn't stop thinking about you while he was in there," it murmured quietly. "You were quite unhelpful."

"Good," Rose said, more than a little snappish and trying not to be pleased that the Time Lord had missed her.

The alien was still staring at the screwdriver. "Please understand," it told her. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. All that we did was so that we could help our people."

"Sure. Haven't heard _that _one before. And how, exactly, was ripping the Doctor's _brain _apart gonna help?" Rose made a little, pointed movement with the device in her hands.

Her target's exoskeleton seemed to go a shade paler. Interesting. "I can explain," it said hesitantly. "It might take time…"

Something, some sense buried so deep in the woman's consciousness that she didn't even know it was there, rebelled. The image of the Doctor hooked up to the wires, somehow getting _worse _once he was disconnected, passing out on the floor… She tamped down her panic, reminding herself to breathe, trying to think.

"Do you know where the TARDIS is?" she asked.

The alien looked slightly confused, but didn't question her. "Yes. They put it in storage, I think, as soon as they figured out that the defences were just on the inside…"

Rose regarded the Time Lord's crumpled form for a moment. She wasn't a weakling, not by any means, but she had no idea how far away the ship was. Dragging him all the way there was… not precisely desirable, Janet was gone, and the insectoid in front of her was her only remaining… well, not ally, but at least someone who wasn't trying to kill her. She didn't think that it would try anything, not with the threat of sonic death, but she didn't—couldn't—know for sure.

But she also couldn't just _leave_ him there. But she also also couldn't trust the thing not to lead her straight into a trap. But, then, they needed the Doctor, didn't they? They wouldn't hurt him… except they already had… except…

Rose stared at the unconscious man, then at the blue thing staring innocently at her. Something nudged at the back of her brain somewhere, and she sighed.

"Help me get him there," she said. "Y'can explain on the way." Worried by the creature's surprise, she gave an addendum. "But _don't _try anything." Just because her hunches were usually right didn't mean she trusted them completely.

The alien made an affirmative noise and carefully, gently, eased the Time Lord into its claws. Rose tried to ignore the way his head lolled, anxiety twisting somewhere in her chest.

She had better not be wrong about this.

-BAD WOLF-

_"—ng, stupid, infuriating—"_

The Doctor had been knocked, drugged, or otherwise been unhealthily forced into unconsciousness a lot. It was almost ridiculous, really. If he had been a member of any other species in the entire universe, the brain damage would have been disastrous; as it was… well, it might explain some of his odder habits, but even then it would be more of an annoyance than anything else.

_"—d, when I catch you—"_

What was he saying? Err, thinking? Oh, right. The point was that he had quite a bit of experience with this sort of thing. Sometimes he hallucinated a little, sometimes he just kind of sat there, sometimes he woke up with no actual knowledge of what had happened; it all depended on the circumstances, and frankly, all of those side-effects were more than a little boring now.

_"—don't care what you are, I will—"_

The half-telepathic rant was new, though.

_"—so hard you'll never—"_

The Doctor blinked, standing up just a second before he remembered that he wasn't actually substantial just then. Oh well.

_"—wiping bits of you out of the cosmos for MILLENNIA, I SWEAR TO RASSILON—"_

He winced a little. Whatever the thing talking/thinking in his head was, he dearly hoped it wasn't mad at him. Come to think of it, what was it? Digging through his own mind with practised ease, locating the little glowing link to the incensed entity, he pulled it into the foreground and told it in no uncertain terms to show itself.

_"Were you always th_is pushy?" the creature mumbled, voice solidifying along with its projected body. Almost as soon as it—she—became fully visible, the Time Lord wished she hadn't; she shifted between forms—first wolf, then woman—too quickly for even his thoughts to follow. A light as painful in its brightness as it was in its _wrongness_ blazed from her, causing bits of his mind to instinctively flinch away from her.

Perhaps it was best not to look, the Doctor mused, so he didn't. "I have had," he said slowly, "a very long day, and I would _very _much like it if people would stop barging into my brain."

The wolf-girl sniggered, a bitter, hostile little noise. "Get used to it. And stop trying to figure out who I am, because it's not going to work."

The Doctor metaphorically froze. He hadn't even let _himself _know of that investigation. Not that it had been much use; the intruder's very existence was so tangled, as impossibly familiar as it was impossibly wrong, that he hadn't even got beyond the idea that This Creature Should Not Be.

"I have a name," she snapped.

"What is it?"

An uncomfortable pause. "…I probably shouldn't tell you."

The Time Lord rolled his imaginary eyes, reluctantly retreating his mental probes. He tried not to be too relieved that he didn't have to try and figure her out anymore; every time he dug too deeply, his mind broke a little.

"Good boy," the wolf-girl said, grinning a little in a way he did not at all like. "Even if you knew what I was, you wouldn't understand."

The Doctor scowled fiercely at her. "What do you want," he ground out, not even bothering to pronounce it as a question.

"Oh, a lot of things," she replied smoothly. "Most of them hinge on you not being so phenomenally _stupid_, but you can't exactly help that."

He gaped at her.

"The one that brings me _here,_ though," the entity continued, ignoring him, "is a great deal simpler to correct."

Silence.

More silence.

The wolf-girl blinked at him. "You aren't going to ask me what it is?"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her. "Why?"

"More fun that way? …No? Fine." She sighed a little, drumming her nonexistent fingers on her insubstantial leg. "You're dying," she informed him.

"…ah." It was kind of sad, really, how readily he accepted that information nowadays. It took at least five seconds before the panic set in. What had happened? The damage from the device couldn't have been _that _bad. He was just… err… comatose, and having extreme difficulty not being so. He should be fine in just a few hours.

"Doctor."  
If he _was_ dying, though, this was an exceptionally bad time to do it. He hadn't even got himself out of the situation killing him yet. Usually he'd managed to stave off the whole regeneration thing until _after_ he'd solved the universe's problems once again. Admittedly, part of that was because he didn't like regenerating outside the TARDIS; it left him even more discombobulated than usual.

_"Doctor."_

A sudden, prickling, terrified dread blazed through him. What was happening to Rose? Was she okay? What would she do when (if—he didn't quite trust things that burrowed into his brain and told him he was dying) he did die?

Would she still l—

_"DOCTOR."_

The Time Lord shook himself, attention abruptly yanked back to the glaring wolf-girl.

"Are you done?" she asked acidly.

"…Yes," he said, uncharacteristically quiet. He didn't know exactly why he wasn't just throwing the thing out of his mind—he probably could have done, if he tried hard enough. But every time he contemplated it, some cold, terrified kind of… not precisely reverence, not fear or respect, but some acknowledgement that she was something powerful enough to bend the Universe around her in frankly dizzying ways. Paradoxically, that very acknowledgement scared him more than her existence. What _was _she? Why didn't he _want _to fight her?

"Good," she said, choosing for once not to comment on his mental tirade. "You were right, for once; your brain isn't that badly hurt. But you certainly don't have as much time as you need to heal, and even if you're caught by the people who kidnapped you in the first place, they're not going to consider you useful anymore."

"Bit impatient, aren't they?" he mused.

The wolf-girl shrugged. "They aren't my problem. Now, I doubt I'm supposed to interfere, but there's no one else to tell me what to do and I wouldn't listen anyway."

The Doctor smirked a little. Now, _that _attitude was familiar, at least.

"I'm better qualified than you," she snapped, evidently annoyed at the insinuation that she shared any traits with a being so obviously inferior.

"Oh, who could doubt it?" he mocked cheerfully. Consciousness began to creep back into the realm of possibility, little starbursts of lucidity exploding around him.

"You know, I don't _have _to save you," she grumbled, but her features blurred into darkness, the dream crumbling under the weight of reality. Evidently not one to let anyone—including herself—have the last word without a fight, she spoke again. Her words echoed dimly, muffled by the sudden sensations from the outside world, but the telepathic pressure beneath it was unmistakable.

_"You can't have her."_

-BAD WOLF-

The alien's name was Yssa, and she was a member of a species known as the Beyerith. She was a scientist working to save her species from the pandemic slaughtering them; she and the others working towards that goal were on a space station, completely cut off from her home planet for fear of contamination. Data and the odd sample were sent from her homeworld to the station, but no one had found a cure. Thus, the need to seek assistance from less local sources.

Rose didn't particularly want to start debating philosophy with the giant blue insect carrying her (_her?_) still-unconscious Time Lord, so she ignored that aspect of the conversation, instead opting to discuss the disease itself. She knew just enough of medicine to treat the most basic of injuries, but still, the information could come in handy. "Where'd it come from?" she asked, eyes darting nervously to a side corridor. Seeing no particular resistance, she sped her steps to catch up with the faster Beyerith.

"We don't know," Yssa replied miserably.

Rose frowned. "Well, it had to have come from _somewhere._" Her visit to New Earth's hospital had taught her that, if nothing else.

"I _know_," the alien retorted a little peevishly. "But if it evolved from an existing disease, it's too different to track it."

"…That's impossible."

"We know."

Rose bit her lip. Something was wrong. Something was very, _very _wrong and she didn't know what to do and where was the Doctor when she needed him?

As if on cue, he spoke. Yssa jumped, startled, nearly dropping him.

"Cabbage," the Time Lord said, quite suddenly. "What year is it?"

-BAD WOLF-

_I don't like going into his head. It's very wrong in there. Of course, he thought much the same of me. Universal differences, probably. Can't be helped. Especially not with the thing falling apart around me and…_

_…what do you mean, why am I not angry? Am I supposed to be? It's not like the alternate Doctor is doing anything he hasn't done before. I suppose I can be annoyed that he's still being stupid, but—_

_That's not it?_

_What's going on?_

-BAD WOLF-

Yssa was late. That was hardly surprising to Thnn, really; his subordinate was _always_ late, no matter how serious her assignment. She wouldn't have even been on the station in the first place if he'd had his way, but there were very few Beyerith who were both uninfected _and _capable of working people into the virtual reality equipment against their will. She was the best they had.

Thnn just wished that she would get it into her skinny little head that the survival of their species was important enough to warrant speed. So he scuttled along the halls, thoroughly annoyed and absolutely ready to yell at her whether or not she had any conclusive results.

And then he saw a body. Then another one, and another. The Beyerith's first stab of panic was quickly overcome; they hadn't been contaminated—the disease visibly ravaged the body, and his fallen comrades had apparently just fallen over and died. A malfunction?

Paranoia started to set in. Deciding to ignore Yssa's existence for now, Thnn instead scurried to the nearest security station. It was disturbingly empty, its lack of even a corpse somehow worse than if there had been another dead Beyerith crumpled in its confines. Briefly, he considered checking to see if one of the other bodies was the guard who was supposed to be here, but… no, it would be best to just look and see what was going on first.

The computers insisted that everything was normal on the entire base. The cameras calmly cycled through their individual loops. The first few, from the corridor Thnn had just exited, showed the same bodies; but images from another hallway immediately adjacent showed his brethren going about their business as if nothing was wrong.

None of this made sense. Why those people? Why had that route been cleared? Where did it go?

Shuddering with a nameless terror, the Beyerith exited the station. He didn't know why that hall had been targeted, but there was one way to find out; he started following the trail of bodies.

A few turns into his trip, a horrible suspicion dug into his exoskeleton. Thnn batted it aside as ridiculous, but his steps hastened all the same. It couldn't be him. The Doctor _didn't kill_. It was one of the reasons they had picked him in the first place.

Left. Left. Right. Left. Right.

The final hallway, the one leading to Yssa's workplace, was empty of the dead; seeing no conclusive evidence of the living, though, Thnn darted towards her door with a speed borne of near-panic.

The Doctor was gone. Yssa was gone. The equipment buzzed angrily, screens flashing warnings about brain damage and premature evacuation. Wires were scattered across the floor, hastily discarded without a hint of respect for their fragility or importance.

Why Yssa had not sounded the alarm, Thnn didn't know. He didn't stop to figure it out, though; in half a second, he was at the console, frantically pressing buttons.

The computer gave a nerve-searing wail, cold words interspersed between long shrieks. _"Alert. Alien loose on base. Alert."_

Just because the Doctor wasn't known for killing didn't mean that he didn't, after all.

-BAD WOLF-

BLARGH THE LATENESS. I am sorry. –shame- On the bright side, though, I started writing today's bit of this when I was being Epicly Sad and Not In A Writing Mood, so I IGNORED it, and now I feel BETTER. In fact, I feel BETTER ENOUGH to speak in RANDOM CAPS LOCK. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Parenthetically, it's not that I'm obsessed. There are just… some things in a movie that you don't notice until you watch it for the twelfth time. …in one week. BUT I'M NOT OBSESSED.

Also, the 666th review gets an imaginary cookie, because things like that amuse me.

Be well, everyone!


	49. Disillusioned, part IV

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Note to Internet: If you're going to flame me, at least pick a story that I don't readily admit is _crap._ Fail, anonymous person. _Fail._

SIAPNIAN: I came to a rather… unnerving conclusion a few days ago. Not all of you are supporting the Doctor who is going to get Rose at the end of this. There's no way I'll be able to change your minds in… -thinks- Oh, whatever. However many chapters it is. Anyway, the point is… if you are disappointed, will you… not be mad at me? I was originally going to write an alternate (heh) ending so everyone would be happy, but… I've kind of written myself into a corner just trying to get this thing not to drag on for the rest of eternity, and if I _do_ have an alternate ending, it'll rip a plot hole into this thing roughly the size of Mars. So… D: D: D:

**Apology:** Week 1: When no one was looking, Emily got two hours of sleep. She got 2 hours of sleep. That's as many as two ones. And that's terrible. Week 2: I was sick. Terribly, annoyingly, agonisingly sick. I believe much of Saturday was spent not even being able to get off the couch for more than a couple of minutes before either tiring out or developing a headache. Or both. And my laptop's still broken. Week 3: I don't even know. O.o

**WARNING:** School has happened again, and it has happened with much. I'm going to try my very hardest to update on time, because I do love you people and your very existence gives me ineffable joy, but I'm just warning you now in case Extenuating Circumstances get in the way. Again.

**Parenthetically:** Congrats and EEEVIL BISCUITS to Die Flow for sending in the 666th review. ^_^

-BAD WOLF-

Rose's sudden blaze of relief at the Doctor's conscious state was quickly overtaken by even more worry. He wasn't making _sense._ He wasn't even making sense to her and she had been carefully training herself to understand him even in his strangest moods.

"No, never mind, that won't help," the Doctor continued, annoyed. He squirmed until Yssa loosened her grip on him, then slid out of her claws with a worrying kind of grace. He'd just been dy—very badly hurt; it was wonderful that he was even conscious, but shouldn't he be staying still? Even with his magical Time Lord-ness, he shouldn't be able to just… come back like that. Not from something nasty enough to make him pass out against his will. Not that she was protesting, of course, but there was something very… wrong about all of this.

Rose shook herself. "What won't help?" she asked, a little dazed.

"The year. Obviously it's too early or these charming people wouldn't have captured us in the first place… speaking of which…" The Doctor turned and tilted his head at Yssa as if only just noticing her. "You switched sides?"

Yssa took a half-step back, the scrutiny apparently making her nervous. "I—" she managed before losing all inclination to speak.

"I may have taken her hostage," Rose admitted. "A little." The Time Lord's eyes returned to her and she felt herself flush a little. Her actions _had_ been a good idea at the time, she was sure of it, but she didn't exactly enjoy his disapproval—if, indeed, he would disapprove. His morals were notoriously sketchy at times.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her. She wiggled the screwdriver at him. Confusion, respect, and something dark and unidentifiable vied for control of his facial expression; confusion won. How had she even known that they would be susceptible to sonic attacks? _Did_ she know, or had she once again taken advantage of the fact that the innocuous (ha!) little screwdriver looked an awful lot like a weapon?

She shook her head. They'd talk about it later. The Doctor nodded his assent.

It wasn't quite telepathy, but it worked about as well.

In comical unison, they both turned their attention back towards the mildly bewildered Beyerith. Yssa seemed to be torn between fascination, fear, and the overwhelming need to run the hell away while Rose was distracted.

"No one's chasing us?" The Doctor enquired of the spiky alien.

She shook her head, exoskeleton shifting a tinge darker. "I thought if I could recover you before anyone knew you were gone…"

"Mmph," the Time Lord replied understandingly. "Well—"

It was at that point, naturally, that the air decided to explode with noise.

-BAD WOLF-

_I don't understand this. I mean, I suppose I can remember forgetting things… and being… but…_

_I don't even know why I was angry. You've explained it, yes, I can see it in your minds, but it's like it's not even… even sinking in, and I don't… know what to… do about it._

_Oh, shut up about the ellipses. I'm focussing very hard on not forgetting what I'm saying. Whatever this thing is that's… apparently affecting me doesn't seem to do anything to you (Rassilon, it hurts so much just to say that). Maybe it's part of being human. So incredibly primitive that things just can't screw you up? Hmm._

_Either way… I don't want to say this either, but… I need you to do me a favour. (No gloating.) I need you to remember everything I say, and if I start acting erratic or strange or in any way like something unknown is playing with my thoughts again, tell me. Thinking it really loudly usually works. Usually. Unless telepathy is the next thing to go, of course…_

_I don't need you to tell me that I've already said this, but I really don't like this._

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor just _had _to call attention to the fact that there weren't hideous, blaring alarms going off all over the place, didn't he? With a muffled groan that was more irritated than worried, he rapidly turned in a circle to check for guards and then stared at Yssa with what could only be described as ferocity.

"That wasn't me," she yelped, backing up again.

"I know," he said. He did; he had a niggling suspicion that, in her current state, she'd do almost anything to avoid displeasure—from anyone, even him. With this in mind, he spoke again. "The TARDIS. Where is it?"

"I… I was just taking you and Rose to it, it's just… well…" She stuttered a little. "I could take you there, but if you get caught—"

"We'll chance it." It wasn't as if they had another choice. There was no way he could call the TARDIS to him, not with the alarms' interference. Yssa seemed primarily unaffected by its shrieks and the Doctor was immune to most sounds, but Rose… Rose was almost doubled over in aural agony, palms clamped against her ears as fiercely as she could manage. The sound wouldn't cause any real damage, but he didn't exactly _like_ seeing his companion in pain.

Yssa jerked a quick affirmative and took off down the hallway, multiple legs scuttling along at a fairly rapid pace. Loath to disengage her hands if they were actually blocking out the sounds, the Time Lord settled for pulling lightly at Rose's elbow to tell her to run. She complied, discarding her attempt to hinder the computer's wails and catching up to the Beyerith in fairly short order.

Out of the corner of his eye, the Doctor saw another blueish, insectoid shape turning down the hallway. There was no way for it _not_ to spot them.

"They've seen us," he shouted to Yssa. He assumed that she heard him; at any rate, she started running more quickly. Grimly, he matched her pace.

The TARDIS had better be nearby.

-BAD WOLF-

As luck would have it, she was. Rose knew she should probably make sure that everyone was still there and the inevitable pursuing aliens hadn't caught up with them, but the horrible, screeching _noise_ seemed to reach into her head and slam all of her selfish switches on. Instead of checking to make sure that everyone was firmly unscathed, therefore, she unlocked the TARDIS and ducked inside as quickly as she could.

As soon as the woman was safely in the console room, the guilt started. Before she could turn to check on the others, though, the Doctor was already dashing past her. Yssa was having more difficulty, her stature and number of peculiarly long limbs hampering her ability to fit through the entrance. Desperation overcame that particular obstacle; her exoskeleton scraped in a way that had to be painful, but she was inside and seemed relatively uninjured.

Rose ran back to the doors, preparing to close them before their pursuer(s?) discovered the same trick of contortion that Yssa had utilised. Her haste proved to be unnecessary, though; from his place circling the console, the Doctor clicked his fingers sharply. The doors moved instantly, slamming shut with a satisfied kind of finality.

"Three years ago," the Time Lord explained, evidently sensing his companion's look of confusion without needing to look at her. "I got bored, started looking up some of the nonessential protocols. That one comes in handy."

Rose nodded a little. "'Kay." A thought occurred to her. "Do you actually _have _a plan, or are we just…?" She trailed off a little uncertainly. "Not that I exactly want to go back."

"For once in my life, Rose," the Doctor told her, bounding back down the ramp to her, "I do have a plan."

"Does cabbage come into it?" she asked doubtfully. Just because he hadn't collapsed yet didn't mean that he was functioning normally.

"Yes, actually." The Time Lord frowned, turning to Yssa, puzzled. "Why did you come?" he asked. "If you'd stayed behind when I woke up, they wouldn't be after you."

The Beyerith shifted, clearly uncomfortable with the sudden scrutiny. "As far as they're concerned, I let you escape in the first place," she said a little bitterly. "Besides, you… seem like you know more about what's going on… than we do." The last sentence was choked out as if the insectoid was ashamed to even be thinking it.

"I usually do," the Doctor replied offhandedly. "Good to have you with us, Yssa."

"Sorry I said I was going to kill you," Rose added.

"She didn't know how anyway."

The human gave him a slightly withering look. "I might have," she objected. Empty as the bluff may actually have been, she didn't exactly like him announcing it to the creature she'd been trying to trick.

"With the screwdriver?"

Yssa tried to twitch impatiently and got a claw stuck in the grating. "You said you had a plan?" she asked.

The Doctor spun to face her. "Yes! Right!" A pause. "Sorry. Come with me." With that, he turned and darted up the ramp, past the console, and into the maze of corridors growing through the timeship.

Yssa, apparently a little perplexed, glanced over at Rose.

"I wouldn't have killed you, really," the blonde offered. The Beyerith gave her a little nod of understanding.

"I wouldn't have blamed you."

"Well." Rose couldn't really think of an adequate response to that, so she just made a kind of acknowledging noise and started walking towards where the Doctor had gone. "We'd better follow him," she continued, feeling the intense need to say _something_ even if she wasn't quite sure what it was or if it made sense. "Make sure he doesn't…" _Pass out again,_ she wanted to say, but it occurred to her that it might sound like she was blaming the Beyerith. (Which she was, but she didn't have to be rude about it.) Instead of finishing the sentence, therefore, she flapped a hand around for a little bit and quickened her pace.

The Doctor's half-nonsensical babble would be more reassuring than the silence that had descended. Considering how worrying that babble currently was, that was saying something.

-BAD WOLF-

The Time Lord wove through the halls with a practised kind of confidence. He didn't bother keeping track of where he was or where his companions were; the TARDIS had once again obligingly rearranged herself; all any of them had to do was follow her tiny telepathic nudges and they would end up where they needed to be.

After a brief stop in the kitchen to retrieve the needed cabbage, he blissfully continued to the little laboratory he preferred to inhabit when his timeship had had enough of his tinkering. Peeling off a leaf of the vegetable, he waited for the others to arrive.

He didn't have to wait long; the TARDIS must have given them a shortcut.

"So," Rose said. "Cabbage?"

"Yes," the Doctor replied happily.

"Why?"

"Because that's how the Beyerith will have fought off this when it should have will happened." That was probably the wrong tense, he thought ruefully, but apparently the magical glowing wolf-girl hadn't quite fixed _everything._ Or maybe English really was that limited a language.

Yssa cocked her head to one side. "What?" she said, her voice resigned enough that there was barely an inflection in the query. Clearly she had gotten used to being confused.

Oh well. She couldn't help it if she didn't have an intimate knowledge of what was going to happen in a few thousand years. The Doctor inhaled deeply.

"I can only assume that the virtual reality was perfect in every detail," he said. "As soon as I stopped trying to figure out what it was just going your current timeline—or, to be slightly more accurate, what little of it I knew—I figured out what the disease was. The good news, of course, is that I also know how you people beat it."

"With cabbage," Rose said dubiously.

"Yes," he snapped. "Really, Rose. All the things you've seen and you're doubting a vegetable's ability to wipe out a plague destroying an entire species."

Yssa interrupted him. "You know how to stop it?" she asked, sounding a little stunned.

Rose tilted her head a bit. "But you just said that none of this timeline got out," she objected. "How d'you know how to help them?"

The Doctor winced a little. "That… brings us to the bad news."

The Beyerith's exoskeleton turned slightly teal. "The bad news?" she echoed.

He glanced at her. "You're fighting a disease that shouldn't have existed for another four thousand years."

That situation had sounded a lot more dramatic the first time he'd had to explain it, he thought sadly. Still, until the universe decided to stop falling apart around him, it would have to do.

-BAD WOLF-

I know I've used that cliffhanger before. I'm sorry. But there are only ten minutes left to this Saturday and I don't really want to be any later and the next cliffhanger is at least a thousand words ahead and that's… not something I can write in ten minutes, to put it lightly, particularly considering how long it took me to get this much on the stupid thing. Anyway. I do not expect you people to be at all surprised by this, so here's a Lampshade to keep you company until the next chapter.

So I figured out why I'm so loath to update this particular episode. I lost my plans for the next one. I know it involves Cybermen, but past that? …yeah. And since I completely changed the ending _again_, I need to re-re-re-plan the last two episodes… and I have no idea what I'm doing for the Christmas one… -exasperated noises- I _am_ sorry. It's not any kind of excuse, but… there you are.

I'm still kind of baffled that I'm so close to the end of this thing. Weirdness abounds. O.o Of course, I have at least two story arcs planned and—since Janet has to come in sometime—I know it won't end there. THIS THING WILL NEVER DIE. WHAT HAVE I DONE AAAAH.

…anyway. Love you all!

(Addendum: I tried to log in. I got an error message. SDLFKJHJLK;ADSLJIT'S RAGE.)


	50. Disillusioned, part V

…There's really no way I can apologise enough for the delay. There is also no way I can justify it. Suffice it, then, to say that I am _truly_ sorry for leaving you like that. Honestly.

**Addendum:** I will reply to all of your reviews, I promise. went a bit silly for a while so I have to manually revise the URL for half of them, but I'm not ignoring you. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I _do_ love you all.

-BAD WOLF-

"What, again?" probably wasn't the normal response to history deciding to take the day off, but it was the one that came out of Rose's mouth. A little embarrassed at taking the issue lightly, she glanced down and began fiddling with a… well, she wasn't entirely sure what it was. She probably shouldn't have been touching it, though, so she started tapping the counter instead. The counter wouldn't explode. Probably.

The Doctor stifled a grin. "Yes," he said. "Basically."

Yssa, not having gone through similar circumstances several times in the previous months, took this revelation much less in stride. _"What?"_

The Time Lord turned to face her. "Time is… complicated. And currently broken. Basically, the thing is, you should never have had to go through this in the first place, and as soon as Rose and I find out what's happened to stop that and… stop it, you won't have had to."

Rose trailed her fingers across the white countertop and scuffed her heel against the white floor. She wasn't entirely sure that there was anything in the room that wasn't white and slightly hexagonal, come to think of it. Apparently the TARDIS's redecoration hadn't quite extended here.

Yssa twitched. "I'm not sure I understand," she said hesitantly.

The Doctor sighed. "No, I suppose you wouldn't." Absentmindedly, he tore a leaf off of the head of cabbage and handed it to Rose. "Yssa?"

"Yes?"

He industriously continued his evisceration of the vegetable, fingers making small, neat movements. "Out the door, down the hall to the left, third right. There's a glass on the counter. Could you get it for me?"

The insectoid tilted her head, then gave a soft affirmative and clicked away.

Rose frowned, turning her leaf over and over in her hands. "Doctor, that's the kitchen."

"And it's a glass of water. Yes."

"But there's water—"

The Doctor turned towards her, dark eyes locking with hers, silencing her. "This shouldn't have happened," he said, very quietly.

"Yeah, you said—"

"Something's wrong. And not just a little wrong. Something is going through time and reordering it, tearing it apart. Just _being_ here could make things worse." He paused. "So why are we still here?"

Rose swallowed, hesitating for a moment before opening her mouth. "To help these people?" she asked, oddly unsure of herself. The Doctor's gravity made everything feel a little bit wrong.

"We'd help them more by going and finding why this is happening."

She drew herself up, scowling a little. "Well, we can't just _leave_ them…"

The Doctor took a half-step back, pointing at her. _"Yes._ Exactly. That's exactly my point."

Rose frowned at his finger, puzzled. "Wh…?"

"We should go. We should just pack up and go. Find out what's going wrong, fix it, let Yssa and the victims and everyone go back to the way things should have been." The Time Lord took another moment to breathe, a sardonic little half-smile finding its way to his mouth. "But I _can't_. Every time I think about it, it's like…" He shook his head a little.

"Like what?" Rose bit her lip. "Doctor, what's happening?"

Gently, he took her by the shoulders, gaze piercing through her. "Think about leaving them. Really _think_."

It would be better; she had to admit that. If everything they did just made it worse—

—_can't leave, it's not right—_

—then they should really just—

—_but what would happen to Yssa—_

—Yssa would be just fine as soon as they—

—_you can't leave—_

—why not?

There was no answer. Only a mindless, roaring, overwhelming urge not to think about it. The more Rose tried to fight it, the more she tried to resist, the harder it became to even consider the possibility of locating the real menace.

Something was wrong.

"Doctor?" she whispered.

"We should go," he said. "We should—"

Without warning, without fanfare, the memory of the entire exchange vanished from their minds.

The Doctor blinked and Rose was suddenly extremely aware of his proximity, of the way he stared at her like he wasn't quite sure how she'd got there, of his fingers' gentle grip on her shoulders, and why had he done that (when had he done that) she couldn't remember…

Awkwardly, the Time Lord let go of her and turned back to the cabbage, cheekbones tinged with a faint pink tone.

Rose shook her head a little. "Um," she said intelligently. "Where'd Yssa go?"

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair. "Out to get…" A frown. "I should… I should go get her." Evidently glad of the distraction, he darted out of the room.

-BAD WOLF-

_THAT. THAT THERE. That was not me._

_I knew something else was going on. I knew it. I probably knew it five or six times by now because __apparently__ Rose and the other Doctor aren't the only ones with memory loss, but still, I KNEW IT._

_Something wants them to stay there. That something is __definitely__ not me because I'd actually much prefer them to leave and figure out what's tearing their—his—universe apart so Rose can go back home and everything can be fine again. And now something's messing with that, messing with __me__, trying to keep them from looking._

_Don't know why. I'll find out, though. I will find out, I will destroy it, and then I will get Rose back._

-BAD WOLF-

Holding glasses was, as it turned out, not the easiest thing for Yssa's species to do. She hissed quietly to herself as her claws bumped against the thing, sloshing liquid all over the counter for about the fourth time. Why had the Doctor even sent her in here if she couldn't…

"Yssa?"

She spun around as quickly as she could in the confined space. One of her legs bumped into the table and she flinched a little.

The Doctor was poking his head through the doorway, looking extremely apologetic. "Um," he said. "We didn't actually need that… as it turns out."

Yssa tilted her head at him. "What?"

The Doctor scratched the back of his neck. "Well, it's—I wasn't technically involved in making the antidote the first time and I thought…" He trailed off. "Anyway. Doesn't matter. Sorry."

She made what she hoped to be a forgiving noise and twitched the leg she'd hit. "Now what, then?" she asked him.

"Now…" The Doctor huffed a breath. "Now we figure out how to get this—" he held up a little vial of slightly purplish liquid—"into those people."

Yssa took a half-step forward. "That's…?"

He smiled a very little. "Yes."

Something, some deep kind of tension that had coiled in Yssa's thorax ever since the pandemic started, abruptly unravelled. She swayed a little bit, clicking low in her throat, trying to see beyond the relief to focus on what she needed to do next.

"They don't trust you," she said quietly.

"They trust you."

She gave a tiny chuckle. "Somehow I doubt that."

The Doctor tilted his head a little. "Maybe. But you're still the only person who isn't going to shoot me _and _knows your way around that place, so I still need your help."

Yssa tried to force her apprehension down. It was true. She was needed. But if she went out there and they saw her…

She gave a tight little nod. The Time Lord grinned. "Brilliant," he said, and walked away. She squeezed herself through the door and followed him.

Rose peeked out from around the corner and then hopped out into the hallway, reaching out and taking the Doctor's hand as she matched his pace. "What are we doing, then?" she inquired.

He smiled at her briefly. "Well," he said, "first, I think we should move the TARDIS a bit closer to where we need to be. …Yssa, where do we need to be?"

The Beyerith tried not to trip on the grating. "The labs," she said. "If we can send out something to synthesise before the entire planet knows you've escaped…"

He nodded. "Right."

"…but I couldn't tell you exactly how far away they are."

"I'll have the TARDIS find a layout," the Doctor said, waving the hand that wasn't occupied by Rose's. "We'll be fine."

-BAD WOLF-

"Something… tells me," panted Rose between strides, "that you landed… wrong. Again."

"I can't be _that_ far away," the Doctor muttered, glancing back for their pursuers.

Yssa was too busy running for her life to answer. Instead, she gave a panicked kind of whirr and tried to push herself even faster, nearly running into one of the pristine walls in her haste as she turned a corner.

"Which definition of 'far away' are you using again?" the human asked.

"Oi!" The Doctor glared at her a little. "If I hadn't moved the TARDIS, we probably would have been shot as soon as we opened those doors."

Rose growled a bit and kept running.

Yssa decided to ignore them, legs skittering frantically over the floor. They weren't _too_ far away now, all told; probably just a few more turns, but the alarms were screaming overhead and she could hear the other footsteps (or maybe she couldn't; she really wasn't sure anymore) and they were getting closer (probably) and they needed to

She darted through the door to the labs and skidded to an ungraceful stop inside. The Doctor and Rose entered half a second later, the former frantically sonicking the door closed.

Yssa shuddered a little, pain slicing through her nerves at the sound.

"Sorry," the Time Lord whispered. "I couldn't risk them getting in."

She nodded a bit. "I know." Shaking the residual aches from her exoskeleton, she peered at her surroundings.

Terrified and distracted as she was, she had still managed to get to the right room. One wall was almost entirely transparent, overlooking one of the wings where the current batch of infected stared listlessly. The floor was very white and slightly roughened, as it was in all of the areas where traction was more important than convenience. The room was shaped like half a hexagon and every wall was lined with consoles. Faint blips came from unattended readouts. The odd light flashed.

"No one home," Rose acknowledged, frowning a little. "Where'd they all go?"

Yssa stepped over to one of the screens. "We ran out of ideas," she said. "There wasn't much point coming here if there was nothing to test. There are a few people in the bigger labs, but here…"

The Doctor had pried open one of the maintenance panels on the consoles and was poking around inside, scowling. "No wonder you're having so much trouble," he muttered. "Three star systems away there's a newly-established _colony_ that has better equipment than this. And they haven't even finished flying everything in."

"Doctor," Rose said, a warning tone to her voice.

He glanced up at her. She shook her head, just a little; he frowned a bit, but closed the panel and stood up again.

"Well—" he began. The door shuddered, clicked, and jerked a half-inch open.

The Doctor hissed something unintelligible, whipping the sonic screwdriver out and pointing it at the faint flashes of blue outside the room while digging frantically through his pockets.

Yssa crumpled.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," the Time Lord told her earnestly. "I just…"

"Can't you seal the door or something?" Rose asked, instinctively kneeling beside Yssa, their earlier conflict evidently forgotten.

"I could melt it shut, yeah, but then how would we get out?"

Yssa managed to speak. "Do it."

The Doctor glared at her a little. "Yssa, the only way we would be able to escape afterwards is if they _cut_ the thing open.

She glared back. "I _know_," she snapped. "They'll cut it open anyway. You can't stand there forever and I c…" Her willpower cracked a little and she cut herself off with a grating kind of whine, trying to curl away from the noise.

Rose winced in sympathy, patting one of Yssa's legs. "What do you think we should do?" she asked her gently.

"Leave," the alien said. "Melt it shut behind you. I can do this."

The Time Lord stilled, turning to stare at her.

Yssa didn't look at him. "I'll be _fine_," she insisted.

Neither of them looked entirely convinced, but the Doctor wavered. Finally, he relented, the mutinous tension streaming out of his shoulders. For a few fragmented moments he looked very tired and exactly his age.

He nodded at her, respect and sorrow matched in his dark gaze. "Thank you," he said quietly. Keeping his screwdriver hand as far away from her as he could, he fished in his pockets again, finally locating the little vial that—hopefully—would save Yssa's race. He edged over to one of the consoles and placed it on the surface.

"Rose," he said. The woman stood, whispering something apologetic and grateful. The screwdriver's pitch changed—Yssa flinched as fresh pain seared through her body—and the door hummed, grating regretfully open.

The bipeds rushed through and it slammed back closed, muffling some of the noise. The Beyerith heaved herself to her feet, shaking a little. The door started smoking a little as the sonic's grating shriek shifted again; after a few seconds, the metal started running thickly into itself, melding.

Yssa turned away. She didn't know how long it would be before the Time Lord and his companion left. She didn't know how much longer after that it would be before the door was opened again. Either way, she couldn't afford to delay.

So she ignored them all. Ignored the threat, the people still dying, the aches still singing through her frame. She worked.

It was a simple thing, synthesising the liquid, diluting it into a more manageable form. The patients/test subjects/victims (Yssa had never been quite clear on that point) were already hooked up to the system, needles inserted into their wasting flesh, waiting.

She sent the cure into them. All of them. The effects would be far from immediate, she knew, but the Doctor—

Behind her, the door fell open.

-BAD WOLF-

With the sonic on their side and Yssa left behind, the pursuers were more of an annoyance than a threat. Still, the Doctor and Rose ran, darting through the halls, the Time Lord guided by some deep instinct and his companion following him.

They didn't speak until they were safely back inside the TARDIS.

"Is she gonna be okay?" Rose asked, panting a little, brow furrowed.

The Doctor hesitated in his answer just a second too long. "'Course she is, yeah."

She pursed her lips. "Y'don't have to lie to me, Doctor."

Another pause. "She allied with aliens in an attempt to muck about with a very important mission," he told her. "Fraternising with us alone would have been treason against her entire species, according to them."

Rose closed her eyes and nodded a little. She almost hated herself for it, felt like a wishful little child (people died, it happened, she shouldn't try to change it), but she had to ask anyway.

"Can we help her?"

The Doctor looked her in the eye. "Do you want to?"

-BAD WOLF-

Yssa was expecting pain. She wasn't expecting it to be from the sonic screwdriver.

Small hands against her back, pushing her gently, guiding her forward. The Beyerith squeezed herself through an aperture far too narrow, wood scraping against her legs—but the moment she was through, the agony slowing her limbs stopped. Something tall and thin moved quickly past her; there was a clanging kind of _boom_, the entire place shook, and she stumbled. Dazed, she looked around.

She wasn't dead. She was in the Doctor's spaceship. She wasn't dead?

Rose grinned at her. "What, you thought we were gonna leave you behind?"

Yssa stared. "You're taking me with you?"

"Well, not _with_ us, really," the Time Lord interjected. "Just dropping you off somewhere less likely to get you killed."

The boom sounded again and Yssa stumbled a little. The Doctor smiled and gestured towards the doors.

"Welcome to the future," he said in a tone meant to be dramatic and awe-inspiring. Rose rolled her eyes at it.

Yssa laughed then, helplessly, mirth suddenly overtaking the terror and stress that had marked her life ever since the pandemic began.

She'd done it. She'd saved the world. It hadn't been on her own, but perhaps it wouldn't hurt to be proud of herself. Just a little.

-BAD WOLF-

Bit shorter than I was hoping for, but… grah. At least it's something, yeah?

Again, I am so sorry. Honestly. I… argh. I'm sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again. It probably will, but… I'll try.

My love to you all. Be well.


	51. Flesh and Bone, part I

…I do a lot of apologising in this fic. D: D: D:

**EPIC THANKS OF DOOM:** Brona19. Half of this episode's concept comes from him. Gratitude also goes to StarryNight101 for not letting me forget about this. And those of you who made things to go along with this thing for making me actually vaguely interested in this again.

SIAPNIAN: Well done. Here are the test results: Theta is a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says. "A horrible person". We weren't even _testing_ for that.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor picked up a lump of twisted metal, turned it over in his hands, and tossed it unceremoniously back on its heap. Rose yawned absently and shut her eyes against the double suns easing their way towards the horizon. The light was painfully bright even then, the insides of her eyelids turning a brilliant red; she sat up, shielding her face with the crook of her arm and looking to see if the Doctor was done yet.

He wasn't. She slumped back down, drumming the backs of her feet against the gutted shuttle she lay across, pushing her wind-whipped hair away from her face as she waited for the Time Lord to find… whatever it was he was trying to find that had taken him two hours.

The Doctor didn't seem to mind the heat and light as much as she did, but even he had discarded his coat and jacket after a while. The coat now lay beneath her back, saving her from being burned by the sun-scorched metal she was using as a sofa. The jacket was crumpled beside her; next to it lay an ever-increasing pile of things that looked useless but probably weren't.

She thought about going back into the TARDIS, but the Doctor had reassured her that the entire planet was completely empty of anyone or anything threatening and that, of course, meant that he was going to be abducted the moment she took her eyes off of him. So she stayed, and she watched, and she amused herself by trying to figure out how long it would take her to dehydrate in the heat.

Rose reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a packet of jelly babies. The first one stuck uncomfortably to her dry tongue and she quickly gave up on the rest, pulling the jacket over her face instead.

She was just beginning to slip into an unsteady slumber when a sudden scream tore her back into awareness.

-BAD WOLF-

I won't say I'm back because I'm not sure of that yet. I won't give any excuses for this because there really aren't any. I will only say happy Valentine's Day since this update seems to be coinciding with it and enjoy an extra 500-ish words.

Love to you all.


	52. Flesh and Bone, part II

…I actually have an excuse this time? Sort of. I lost my notes and clinical depression hit me hard sometime in April. It took me until the last couple of weeks of December to actually get on antidepressants; I kept just waiting for it to go away, which… it didn't. Anyway, it crippled me hardcore, and everything that I didn't absolutely _have _to do went undone, and I am so, so sorry. I'm not 100% now, I'm on medication for the depression and the OCD that kicked it into existence and the meds are kind of working but we're still trying to figure out dosages. Anyway, the fact that you people have stuck with me through all of this crap is incredible and so, so humbling to me. Thank you for existing.

**Special thanks: All of you. I mean it.**

**WARNING: **This is the UNBETA-ED version. I wanted to post it as soon as possible. ^_^ If my betas get back with me and have any problems with it, I'll repost. Hell, if any of you guys find something wrong with it, I'll repost. So yeah.

Onwards.

-BAD WOLF-

Rose shoved herself off of the surface, stumbled a little on the landing, and started running. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Doctor dropping his burden and falling into step beside her, brown eyes wide as they searched for the source of the disturbance.

The scream cut off suddenly and they powered forward with renewed speed, rounding an outcropping of rubbish to see a struggling figure—human, by the look of it, but it was hard to tell this far forward—being dragged by his head into an absolute wreck of a spaceship. If its interior hadn't been lit by a flickering light, Rose would have mistaken it for just another extension of the detritus all around. The hulk looked like it didn't have an original part left on it and there were entire chunks torn out of the hull—burned through, it looked like, by any number of weapons—patched up haphazardly or just given their own airlocks. Rose frankly wondered how it was even habitable, or what kind of creature could survive such a ship.

Said inhabitants didn't look much better than their craft—bandaged and limping even as they pulled their struggling captive into the airlock. She thought she caught flashes of metal at their joints, hiding beneath the scraps of cloth and scraps of flesh, and something crawled inside her with frightened curiosity.

The Doctor reflexively reached for his suit pocket for his screwdriver. Rose's heart dropped through the ground as they simultaneously remembered where it was: in the jacket currently discarded on one of the broken ships.

"Rosegetthe—"

"On it," she replied, and turned on her heels to start running the other way. She could hear the Doctor shouting—presumably figuring out if he could stop the robot-people-things from kidnapping the kid just by yelling at them for a little bit—but she didn't listen to the words.

"This would be a hell of a lot easier if you'd actually _finished _my screwdriver," Rose shouted over her shoulder at him.

"I can barely remember what I did the last time!" The Time Lord's voice was almost comically petulant. "Cut a man some slack!"

Rose skidded to her old seat in a cloud of oily dust, snatched both coat and jacket from the rusted hull, and dashed back to the other ship as quickly as her legs would carry her.

The cyborgs and their captive had vanished inside the airlock already; the Doctor was rapidly running up the ramp after them.

Rose growled in frustration, her trainers digging into the sun-baked dirt with faster and longer strides as she tried to catch up.

The ship began to take off.

The Doctor vanished inside the dirty, rusted airlock.

Rose would have growled in frustration if she hadn't been saving all of her breath for her running. She didn't even particularly think—not that she had time—; as the boarding ramp left the ground, she made a frantic leap for it.

Her upper body crunched on the unforgiving metal and she wheezed out a breath, trying to scrabble with her jacket-laden fingers to pull her way all the way into the ship, but the ramp helpfully started closing, tilting slowly upwards. Awkwardly, she manoeuvred her legs sideways, wincing as the rough corners dug into her hip, until she finally clawed her way inside the airlock.

Rose tried to turn around so she would slide gracefully down the tilting surface instead of plummeting head-first, but she couldn't quite make it; her trainer lost its traction on the dusty metal and she rolled, a mess of coat and jacket and blonde hair, coming to a bruising stop on the ground.

"Urgh," she said, as quietly as she could manage. She wanted to rest, or at least to lie there and figure out how bad her injuries were, but the ship lurched again and there was the suspicious sound of hissing from the door behind her. If they entered space with her still outside the ship proper…

Ignoring the pain, Rose shoved herself to her feet, panting, her blonde hair flashing around her face as she looked about as quickly as she could.

The airlock was very… airlocky. The door ramp thing at her back was the most interesting feature of the entire room, at least having the added decoration of hydraulic pumps to push it open and shut. The room was about ten or twelve feet tall, she estimated, and about half as wide and deep. Scuffles on the textured floor showed that it was… some sort of metal, but Rose couldn't see anything particularly special about it besides the dirt ground firmly in between the patterned ridges.

Traction, she guessed. That was nice. Could be useful if she needed to run anywhere in this ship.

The walls were, curiously enough, covered with the same roughened texture. The odd scratch and gouge in the surface showed that the entire room had once been a gleaming silver, but even the ceiling was rusted and filthy.

"Weird," Rose mumbled to herself. But not important in the end—or, at least, not important right now. What _was_ important right now was the door opposite her.

It was less of a door, really, and more of an entire wall divided in quarters with neat lines. There was no singular opening mechanism she could see—must be a wireless thing, she thought, or maybe the entire thing was controlled from the inside.

Rose dug into the Doctor's jacket pocket and casually flipped the sonic screwdriver in the air. No problem.

The hissing grew louder. Rose paled a little, trying to breathe as slowly and evenly as she could, and flicked the screwdriver to the basic "unlock" setting.

No dice.

She tried another one, and another, modifying them with almost as much skill as the Doctor himself. Still nothing.

Okay. Different approach. Swallowing nervously, she modified the sound, trying to hit the general technological override frequencies. The door's programming probably defaulted to "closed", but if she could at least get it to glitch for a little bit first—

It wheezed and started groaning open.

Rose didn't hesitate a second. She ran towards it, squeezing through the crack as soon as it got wide enough for her frame, praying that she could get all the way through before the door figured out what was going on and snapped shut again.

She could definitely do without getting crushed to death. It wasn't even noon yet.

With a cry of mingled effort, pain, and triumph, she squeezed through the opening to half-collapse into the wall on the other side. Somewhat anticlimactically, the door kept opening. Slightly less anticlimactically, the ship finally realised that something wasn't quite right somewhere, and the wail of a malfunctioning alarm started wheeze-screaming through the halls.

Rose didn't worry too much about that. She was fairly used to it. Instead, she pocketed the screwdriver and started looking around to see if there was any trace of where her Time Lord had run off to.

The hall she was standing in was curiously shaped, splitting off into three directions. The entire layout reminded her of nothing so much as an office, the perfectly square cubicles extending from floor to ceiling, everything laid out in a grid and illuminated with thin strips of uninterrupted lights at each intersection of wall to ceiling or floor. The lights held their steady, thin white glow despite the clear panic going on, which made Rose feel a little bit better; the scarlet illumination of red alerts always made it so terribly hard to see.

For lack of anything better to do, she picked a direction, started running, and prayed they weren't already inside one of the cubicles. There were so many of them it would be impossible to search them all before she was caught.

Instead, she stuck to the wall, looking right every time she passed an "aisle" between the stacks of rooms. The ship couldn't be _too _big; if she could just catch a glimpse, even, she could probably catch up with the Doctor before—

So focussed was she on her search, she didn't notice that she was lightening until her feet actually left the ground. Squeaking, startled, she scrabbled at the floor for a few seconds, but only managed to push herself closer to the ceiling.

Exasperated, Rose stilled, floating lazily upwards and a little bit sideways. She crossed her arms and huffed a wayward strand of hair out of her face.

"What the hell kind of ship doesn't even have _artificial gravity?_" she snapped at no one in particular. Crumpling the Doctor's clothing between her knees, she fumbled in her own pocket for a hairband and pulled her hair back into a messy ponytail.

There. It could float where it liked now.

Rose let out a slow breath, taking stock of her surroundings again. The sirens sputtered and went out, but she highly doubted the cyborg things had actually stopped looking for her. Either it was a trick to make her relax or the sirens had just… broken.

God, how was this ship even _flying?_

The whole antigravity thing was going to make searching for the Doctor a hell of a lot harder, but what else was she supposed to do? He was running off who knew where with absolutely no plan and sure, while that _did _work for him a lot of the time, it didn't mean he didn't need backup. At the very least, she wanted to be let in on whatever crazy "plan" he'd come up with this time so she could be crazy with him. That was what she'd signed up for, wasn't it?

With a fresh determination, Rose toe-kicked herself towards the nearest cubicle. Maybe this was why all of the surfaces had the same texture, she thought; if the art-grav wasn't working, or hadn't even been built in, they'd have to resort to the old magnetic-boots method—

…Oh.

Rose clung to the side of the cubicle-tower and took a cautious peek around the corner. The cyborgs wouldn't be affected. The cyborgs could walk in this.

…She didn't need to worry about that just yet. Putting the Doctor's clothes on so she wouldn't have to worry about holding them (they smelled like him, even under the dirt and the heat and the rust, and just that little fact slowed her heartbeat enough to think clearly), she kicked herself off of the one tower and grabbed onto the next.

Not in that aisle. Nor the next. Nor the next. She could hear sounds, the muted clunk of metallic footsteps, but she couldn't make out the noises of a struggle; either the cyborgs had silenced their captive somehow and the Doctor was just trying to be sneaky, or—

She couldn't let herself think about that. Licking her lips, Rose took a steady breath and stopped worrying. The hall she was following took a turn to the right only two aisles away; she could search the rest of the ship, just circling around and around, if she needed to. She had a system now.

Rose found herself fighting back a yawn. Her limbs started feeling heavy again. Had she forgotten to sleep again…?

The human bounced into the corner, turned, and found that she didn't have the time to worry about her sleep schedule.

Just around the corner, right where she had been about to propel herself, there stood half a dozen cyborg things, marching towards her with unmatched strides. One limped, scarlet flushing between the metal plates welded onto its leg, and the unexpected humanity of it chilled her to the bone.

Frantically, heart in her throat, Rose shoved herself off the wall the way she had come—but the corner was angled, and she bounced into one of the towers, and she whimpered with the unexpected flare of pain.

(That shouldn't even have bruised. It definitely shouldn't have distracted her. What the _hell _was going on?)

Desperate, she kicked herself on, zigzagging as quickly as she could—tower, wall, tower, wall, amassing tiny pains with each impact. A quick look behind showed that the cyborgs had fanned out, one on the ceiling and floor and four walking seemingly sideways on the walls. She was tired, and she was frightened, and she didn't understand why, and she had to keep moving.

Turned a corner, hoping to lose them in the maze. More approached her, another half-dozen marching out from around a corner, and Rose suddenly worried that she was only working her way towards the ship's bridge.

But they'd clearly already thought to search the corners.

Her brain blurred, fuzzing, and she swallowed and kicked off of her closest perch as hard as she could. One of the new pursuers made a grab for her ankle as she flew past, but thankfully only managed to get a tug at her shoelace in.

A tug at her shoelace that slowed her motion and sent her plummeting a few degrees farther downward than she had intended, completely missing her next target and leaving her floating gently, slowly, almost imperceptibly, towards the wall. With quick, even steps, one of the cyborgs stepped calmly up the wall and caught her, holding her like they were on the cover of one of those trashy romance novels Rose would never admit she read. Well, except that she was struggling as hard as she could to get away and he—she—they were almost mummified in cloth and metal and smelled very strongly of decaying flesh and battery fluid.

The exhaustion increased tenfold with the contact. Rose pushed, kicking viciously at every weak spot she could think of, but the cyborg only tightened its grip. She pushed away with all of her might and only found herself being held from behind, her hands clenched at her shoulders in an exceedingly uncomfortable kind of way.

But her feet were free, so she kicked out at the thing's shins, spiralling up in a perfect half-circle until she was doing a kind of handstand on top of the cyborg's arms, then continuing to whirl until she could get her legs about its waist, crossing her arms across its throat and trying to strangle it with its own hands.

The cyborg's jaw creaked open and did not move again, but words fell from its motionless lips all the same, crackling with static, alternating between a terrifyingly familiar bass rumble and the ear-splitting wail of a broken radio.

"PlEEEEEEAAAAAse do not rEEEEEEsist," it said.

Rose's response may have been less than polite. Finger by finger, she managed to yank one of her hands away from the cyborg's grip, and she wasted no time digging her fingernails into the thing's mouth and _pulling—_

She wasn't expecting it to give so easily. She wasn't expecting it to give at all. But bandage and flesh both gave way in her hand, a ragged strip of putrid skin and once-white cotton, revealing a toothless expanse of a mouth, rife with sores, the ragged throat stuffed with a crude speaker.

Terror, deep and primal, screamed in the back of her head and she started tearing at the monstrosity. Whatever might have been human of this… this… _thing_, it would be better off dead than transformed into this.

The other cyborgs stepped to their comrade's side. With the last free movement she had, Rose gripped the handle-like protrusion on her captive's head and yanked as hard as she could.

The cyborg screamed.

The others held her by the legs, by the waist, by the throat, but she held onto that little pole of metal with all her strength, tendons screaming, but it budged. It didn't break—she didn't expect it to—but it dislodged, jerking out of the creature's ear and bouncing against its temple, leaving dripping streams of artificial nerves behind it.

Artificial nerves.

The little knob inserted in the ear, the C inscribed on its bloodied surface.

The familiarity of that malfunctioning voice.

"Oh God," Rose whispered, before something sharp and cold jabbed into her neck and the world went black.

-BAD WOLF-

…so… yeah! There it is! I did it! Yay!

I think this one's a little shorter than usual—I'm really sorry about that, by the way. I'm also sorry that it was just from Rose's perspective this time, but she's going to be pretty much out of commission for a while, so her perspective is gonna be pretty boring for the next couple of chapters. XD I'm making up for the overdose of Doctor and Wolfie.

I hope all of you had a wonderful year (ugh, has it seriously been a year since I last updated, sldkfj;lfljflfjk) and that this one will be even better.

And that I actually update on a regular basis this time.

Love you guys. Honestly do.

Be well.


	53. Flesh and Bone, part III

Doodeedoodeedooooooooo~

SIAPNIAN: Comics may be the most insidious genre I've ever gotten into. The last time I checked I literally had three trade paperbacks and now I'm in currently-running titles and there are comics all over my desk and I actually know where the nearest shop is and I honestly have no idea when this happened I mean I remember buying all of these but I DID NOT THINK THERE EWRE THIS MANHY WHAT HAPENENSGF

**Warning:** Un-betaed. Err, again. . In my defence, I've been working a weird nameless shift between third and first and neither of my betas are awake for the first half of my days off. XD

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor was a lot better at moving in zero gravity than most people. Unfortunately, that didn't really mean he was particularly fast or graceful about it.

He really should have seen the gravity situation coming. The way the ship was built, the material used to make it, the way all of the airlocks reached from floor to ceiling… He internally cursed himself for being so daft, but that wouldn't exactly help now.

Thankfully, he had managed to get himself in a corner fairly early on and keep himself there while he tried to figure out what to do.

Problem: He'd lost sight of the captured kid while trying to get into the corner in the first place.

Problem: He'd lost sight of Rose when he took after the kid in the first place.

Problem: He didn't even know if she was in the ship at all.

Problem: She might never have gotten through the airlock.

His blood started trying to escape through his toenails at the last thought and he shut it down as quickly as he could. She was a clever girl, she had the screwdriver, she could get herself out of a situation like that. Nothing to worry about. She was fine.

The sirens started wailing and the Doctor grinned fiercely. Oh, she was most definitely fine.

"That's my Rose," he informed no one in particular, easing himself into midair. If he could find her before the Cybermen did, today might not be so bad after all.

-BAD WOLF-

_That's **not **your Rose, idiot. You never had one._

_Yeah, I'm still here. What did you think happened to me? Just because I have a lot of things I could be doing doesn't mean I'm going to do them._

_Besides, something's wrong. Not the thing that was already wrong, but there's something wrong there in that ship and I don't like it._

_I guess I'll just fix it later. It's not like I haven't done that before. What could it hurt, anyway?_

-BAD WOLF-

Rose awoke with a surprising lack of ropes, chains, plastic bands, rubber bands, hair bands, bands actually made of hair, or whatever other of the thousands of restrains she'd previously woken up in. That was a little worrying on its own, honestly, but she pushed her freedom of movement to the back of her mind to deal with later.

A long time ago, she'd gotten into the habit of waking up pretending not to be on edge. She kept her muscles relaxed, her eyelids slack; she funnelled all of her tension into curling her toes, the motion unnoticeable through her trainers. And she listened.

The sound of the engines was the same, a kind of hiccupping whirr that could only come from a ship held together with duct tape and willpower. She hadn't moved _ships_, then; the pattern of the halting jerks was the same as before.

Good. That made things a little less complicated.

She couldn't hear any of the Cybermen clomping about or speaking. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing was yet to be determined. Before she opened her eyes, she carefully—so carefully—tensed her left shoulder.

The sonic screwdriver reassuringly poked her in the armpit.

Rose let out a long, slow breath, part sigh of relief and part furthering of the I Haven't Been Awake For Five Minutes Already No Sir act.

She sniffed idly and cracked her eyelids open.

"…well, this is sorta boring," she mumbled, frowning at the shadowed wall-ceiling-floor-whatever.

She was pretty much in a small, lightless box. Okay, come to think of it, _maybe _it was a little more like a coffin, but as far as those went she'd definitely been in worse. Wouldn't have complained if this one smelled like cedar instead of the acrid, bloody tang of shorn metal.

…And actual blood.

There was a faint crack of a light source behind her head, barely enough to see her own hand by at first. As her eyes adjusted, though, she could definitely see darkened, panicked smudges on the surfaces around her. Fingertips, claws, what looked sometimes to be pawmarks… didn't seem to matter, really; lots of things had been in here, and they'd been scared.

Rose contemplatively chewed on her lower lip, her heartbeat starting to pick up. Okay. That was a little worrying.

Rose bit her lip. Well, it wasn't as if the situation could get _much_ worse.

"Hello?" she called into the darkness.

The darkness gave a tiny squeak and thumped against the wall to her right.

Her heart sped up a bit, excited. "Is there someone else in here?"

"Y-" Shuffling. Another thump. "Y-yeah."

"Let me guess, you're stuck in a little metal box too, yeah?"

"M-mmhmm."

Rose rolled onto her side, pressing a hand against the wall as if her fellow prisoner could feel it. "I'm Rose," she said softly. "What's your name?"

"...Liam."

"Liam. Nice to meet you, Liam." She bit her lip thoughtfully. "Tell you what, you and me, we're gonna get out of here, yeah?"

Liam gave a tiny, manic laugh. "How? Even if we got out of these things, we're in _space,_ there's nowhere to go, and-"

"And I've got a friend on the outside. He can help. Trust me."

"A friend." The two syllables held a universe of disbelief.

Rose grinned. "Believe me, you wouldn't be worried either if you'd met him."

Awkward, uncomfortable shuffling. "Even if-" More shuffling. "...I hope he gets here fast."

She sniggered. "Wouldn't worry about that either if I were you. He always seems to show up j—"

Outside, a door slipped open and Rose snapped her mouth shut. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still, just in case, and she listened.

_Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang._

Static. "ThEEEEEEeeeeee readings-are-cOMplete."

Rose shuddered a little. As if the Cybers' voices hadn't been creepy enough when they _weren't_ glitching. What the hell had happened to them, anyway? They didn't exactly _look_ like a victorious army, but why would they still exist this far forward if they hadn't won the war back on Earth?

"AAaaand?" She could only assume that that was a second voice because it was just a little more staticky than the first one. Probably over a comm system, she guessed, but with the state of these guys she couldn't tell.

"The MALe is IIIIIRRELEvant," proclaimed the first. There was a tiny, shaking sigh of choked relief from Rose's right.

She tensed her jaw, waiting. If there was one thing that she could count on, it was that she had enough markers both from the Void and the Vortex that there wasn't a species in the universe that didn't find her at least a little interesting. Falling between universes and controlling Time for a few minutes had a tendency to light up every sensor anyone could possibly wave at her.

It made stealth missions really, _really _suck.

"And the FEEEmale?"

Silence. A clicking, grinding noise. Rose almost wondered if that particular Cyberman had scavenged parts from the '95 desktop her mum'd kept for ten years.

"UNNNKNown," the first finally replied. "CompaaaAAAAAaaa—"static—"aatible. PoweR UNKnown. Limiiiits unkNOOOWWn."

Rose bit her lip. _Damn _it. She fingered the screwdriver in the pocket of her hoodie, half-tempted to just sonic her way out of there and make a break for it.

…somehow. The damn gravity still wasn't on, if the ship even had it, and the walls were too dirty for her trainers to get much purchase.

"OOOrders received," the second voice announced, crackling. "WeeEEEEE REEturn to MONdas. ActivaaAAAte hEER chAMBer in the mEEEAAAANtime."

She didn't react. She didn't have time.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor abruptly dropped out of the air. He yelped as he fell, a tangle of limbs twisting in a frantic attempt to land on his feet.

He ended up on his chest instead.

The Time Lord winced in pain, digging his fingernails into his palms as he struggled with his diaphragm. After a few seconds of that argument, he finally managed to gasp a breath, and then another.

Okay. Good. Now, to figure out what was going on. The ship was originally a 22nd century human-made vessel and a fairly basic one at that. It definitely hadn't been designed with gravity generators in mind; those had been added later. Why and by whom was another question, but also one that he didn't need to deal with right now.

The Doctor pushed himself to his feet, frowning down the hallway. He probably still had some kind of magnetic climb-y thing in his trouser pockets, so getting around the ship wasn't the problem. The problem was why the gravity was on in the first place. If they'd always had enough power to run it—and they felt like running it at all—there was no reason for it to have been off.

If they _hadn't_ had enough power before, they'd found another source. A big one, probably, to reassure them to the point of convenience as well as raw function.

The Time Lord took a few experimental steps. He wasn't dizzy. He wasn't weak. It wasn't him.

(Flicker of ancient, remembered pain from his first death. He'd know if it was. It wasn't a feeling he could forget.)

The teenager they'd kidnapped was, as far as he could tell at first glance, just a teenager. Which left them with two options: either they had another source and they decided to take some extra ones anyway, or…

The comm system crackled online. "DestIIIiiination AALLtered. ArrIIIiival at MONDaaaas in 2.4 houUUUrs."

The Doctor tugged his fingers through his hair. It wasn't a big ship, but without his screwdriver it would take a hell of a lot longer to search. If he could find a mainframe, he might be able to locate the energy nets through that, but he'd have to crack it manually and who knew how the system was built and he didn't have _time_ for this—

Half-growling in frustrated worry, he picked a direction and started running. The engines had gotten louder, but maybe—just maybe—he could follow the subtler sounds, find the power source.

Maybe.

-BAD WOLF-

It was dark. Everything was dark. Rose couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't hear or taste or smell. The only reason she knew she still had a body was how much it _hurt_. She thought she was still breathing, probably. Her chest throbbed with exhaustion every few seconds and she wanted to stop, needed to stop, but she didn't have a choice not really she was Rose Tyler and she didn't just give up. Never.

It wasn't even pain, she mused, in the flickers of moments that she could focus enough to think. It was… running for an hour and knowing you're only halfway home. Weakness. Shaking, screaming _weakness_, turning every muscle into lead.

Her mind hurt. She thought she could probably scream if she tried. She was too tired. Screaming took too much effort. She was better off quiet.

They hadn't moved her. Hadn't even touched her. One moment she was just sitting in the box doing nothing and then she was sitting in the box doing nothing some more but liking it a hell of a lot less.

Liam. They weren't doing this to him too, were they? They hadn't said they would, but…

He was just a kid. He couldn't…

(_she _felt like a kid, still the nineteen-year-old nothing trying to make something of her life somewhen else, the years and the hardness peeling away and leaving her a wreck and she hated it she hated it)

The Doctor would come for her. He always came for her. Sometimes he came a little too late to be convenient and sometimes he came and ended up in trouble himself but he always—he always—

She couldn't feel her fingers. She might have been cold. She felt like she should have been cold. She didn't know.

There was a strength, a will hidden inside her that she fell back on when everything else was lost.

Something cold and mechanical tore it open and drank its fill.

-BAD WOLF-

The Doctor rounded a corner at full speed and just barely avoided slipping on a lump of stringy whitish goop. Skidding to a stop with an uncanny grace, he whirled on it, crouching down and frowning. The ship was hardly clean by any standards, but this looked like…

He reached out, pinching one of the gooey bands between his fingers and raising it to his nose.

Artificial nervous system. Slight tang of metal, little bits of torn wires woven through the flesh. The Cyberman it had belonged to wasn't in sight; didn't necessarily mean it had survived, of course, just that it wasn't there anymore and no one had bothered to clean up past that.

He would have noticed a while ago if the shipmates had started attacking each other, so whoever'd done this was either Rose or one of the other captives. Which meant that if he could track them…

The Time Lord rose to his feet, looking around at walls and ceiling and floor, frowning, searching for something—anything—that he could follow. Smudges on one of the walls, scuffling footsteps, but the metal refused to give any specific clues as to direction either way.

And then, there. A tiny clean spot, as if something had bumped against the wall in motion, incidentally wiping a bit of dust from the surface. Another a few feet forward. And then another on the other side.

Jogging over to the spot closest to eye level, the Doctor squinted at it, hoping—

…well, it certainly _looked_ like it had been made with fabric. And not the rough, dirtied gauze that peeked through wherever the Cybermen were unarmoured. Probably.

Okay, it could have been his imagination and it could have been completely natural circumstance and it could have been one of the captives bumbling about before being brought to wherever they were brought to and it could have been

…It could have been a lot. But it was all he had, really, short of getting himself captured too. Besides, maybe he'd run into something a little more useful on this path.

Maybe.

The Doctor took a breath, forced his worries into the back of his mind, and started following the trail.

-BAD WOLF-

mews quietly into the distance

falls asleep quietly into the distance

loves you guys loudly into the distance


End file.
